About

Marina Wainer is a Paris-based multidisciplinary artist

Her work takes many forms and is deployed in various environments. It is often the result of transdisciplinary collaborations, with researchers and scientists, but also with artists from other disciplines.

After studying dance, video art and new media creation, she started making interactive art. The projects are imagined as sensitive experiences and places the audience at the heart of the work. MW explores societal issues and spaces of representation to create new perceptions and open up perspectives. The interaction proposed in her work, which encourages participation, has sometimes turned into collaboration, involving the public upstream (including working with communities). Her work has been shown in France and abroad, as part of exhibitions in museums, galleries and festivals.

MW is also developing a photographic work produced in the digital space [with smartphones / social networks, especially Instagram]. A project that focuses on new forms of staging reality and proposes to cross and resonate different narratives and territories. Part of this production has been integrated into recent installations and developed in studios with students and workshops for the general public.

A decade ago, after a strong urban anchor, MW started a work in natural landscapes, which questions our anthropocentric relationship to the natural world under different angles.

Her practice of technology in the physical space led her to collaborate with architect Valérie de La Chapelle within La Fracture Numérique collective and more recently the studio InterActStructure, in the context of scenography, spatial and interaction design and interventions in the urban space. These projects were commissioned by cultural institutions and companies.

Her approach – at the nexus of creation, research and innovation – has also allowed her to turn to teaching and event-based art direction in different academic and cultural contexts.
For the Monde Festival [organized by Le Monde newspaper], she designed a series of collaborative workshops for the general public, from 2015 to 2017. Since 2014, she has regularly collaborated with the Grand Palais and the Grand Palais Immersif in the context of its cultural programme, with the production of performances, the design of workshops and the organization of events.

Between 2012 and 2016, she launched and organized the soirées *di*/zaïn, a series of events (28) devoted to creation, bringing together creators and researchers. From 2017 to 2023, she has been the head of programming and artistic director of the Forum Design, a travelling event that takes place every two years, which address questions on our ways of inhabiting the world through the crossed viewpoints of artists, designers, architects, researchers and scientists.

On the pedagogical side, after teaching digital cultures and mentoring projects in art, design and architecture schools, she has been the co-director of the post-graduate specialized Master’s degree in Creation and Contemporary Technology at ENSCI-Les Ateliers. She also runs workshops in different academic contexts.

MW has been invited to give lectures and participate in round tables on themes related to her work at various institutions: Grand Palais, University of Brighton, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Gaîté Lyrique, Iceland University of the Arts, Centro Recoleta [Buenos Aires], Universidad de Antioquia [Medellin], Ecole Supérieure d’Art et Design d’Orléans, Maison de l’Architecture en Ile-de-France, Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Institut Français.