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Note that your XML data needs a root node and that your attribute values should be quoted, i.e. your data file should look more like this:

<!-- data.xml -->

<instances>
    <instance ab='1'>
        <a1>aa</a1>
        <a2>aa</a2>
    </instance>

    <instance ab='2'>
        <b1>bb</b1>
        <b2>bb</b2>
    </instance>

    <instance ab='3'>
        <c1>cc</c1>
        <c2>cc</c2>
    </instance>
</instances>

Now you can use XPath with xmlstarlet to get exactly what you want:

xmlstarlet sel -t -m '//instance' -c "./*" -n data.xml

This produces the following output:

<a1>aa</a1><a2>aa</a2>
<b1>bb</b1><b2>bb</b2>
<c1>cc</c1><c2>cc</c2>