About Anna Marckwald
Anna Marckwald, 29 year old, is a curator and art educator currently completing a Master’s thesis in Curatorial Studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste – Städelschule and Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.
In her Bachelor’s degree, she has studied art history and art education at the University of Leipzig, she is intensively involved in both theory and practice with the aspect of art education in museal contexts.
Her fields of activity represent involvement not only in institutions dedicated to modern and contemporary art (such as the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt (MMK), documenta fifteen or the Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig) but also ethnological and historical museums, such as the Historisches Museum Frankfurt and the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde Leipzig.
Her keen interest in the field of mediation and community engagement can be seen in her work at the interdisciplinary art and culture centre The Community Centre Paris following her Erasmus studies in Paris last year. She was able to get to know the structures and actors of the art and culture scene in the Seine-Saint-Denis department — not far from the Fondation Fiminco.
For her, the areas of curation and mediation are hardly conceivable as independent from one another; every aspect of exhibition design has a striking influence on its mediation and reception. Thus the exhibition projects she curates also often intend to transgress boundaries, and to design the exhibition space as a social one: The exhibition “Moving Plants” (2020) at the Frankfurt Botanical Garden, which she curated alongside her Masters cohort at Städel Schule, examined the historical and contemporary movements of plants against the backdrop of the European botanical garden’s deeply rooted colonial history. Through nine artistic positions (including Zheng Bo, Cooking Sections and Zac Langdon Pole), the multimedia installation (films, sound
works, installations, frescoes, performance) throughout the park created new perspectives and associations regarding the ambivalent relationship between nature and culture, human and environment, subject and object.
This year, she curated Elisaveta Braslavskaja’s solo exhibition “Knife and Comb” at fffriedrich, a project space in Frankfurt. The exhibition explored techniques of Persian carpet weaving that in the artist’s oeuvre became emblematic of personal and collective “entangled histories”. Through curatorial detailing, the boundaries between exhibition and private space were subtly dissolved. Her recently opened group show “Closest Distance” (2022) at etta, an artist-run space in Düsseldorf, which presented works by Emily Dietrich, Béla Feldberg, Katharina Keller and Esra von Kornatzki, also explored the social dimension of space – the choreographies that unfold within urban landscapes and the inclusions and exclusions they produce.
She is currently curating the interdisciplinary exhibition project “Rudus Flora” with students from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris, funded by the Fondation de France, which is expected to open in March 2023 at the Tour Orion in Montreuil.
