Queer Modernism/Queer Curating

Video (1:26:19): Anke Kempkes will address questions arising from the curatorial framing of queer art in the Modern era, drawing on her concept for the exhibition Queer Modernism 1900–1950 at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf (27.09.2025–15.2.2026) co-curated by Isabelle Malz, Curator at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, with Isabelle Tondre, Research Assistant at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Gluck, Bank Holliday Weekend, (1937).

Anke Kempkes is a curator, art historian, and author whose work critically engages queer-feminist perspectives and transnational narratives of Modernism. She studied at the University of Cologne and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and received her doctorate from Middlesex University, London, with a dissertation on Formations of Gender and Sexuality in the Avant-Gardes. She has served as Curator at Kunsthalle Basel and as Curator at Large at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland, and was Lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her exhibitions include Queer Modernism 1900–1950 (K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025/26); The Laughing Torso (Frieze Masters, London, 2023); I Saw the Other Side of the Sun with You. Women Surrealists from Eastern Europe (Cromwell Place, London, 2023); Konkret Global! (Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg, 2022/23); Evelyne Axell. Body Double (Muzeum Susch, 2020); Land of Lads. Land of Lashes and Dimensions of Reality: Female Minimal (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London and Paris Pantin, 2018/20). In 2004 she curated Flesh at War with Enigma at Kunsthalle Basel, the first survey exhibition in Western Europe since 1977 of the Polish-Jewish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow.

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