Departure from feminist geography, using critical nostalgia as the curatorial starting point where past overlooked female artists from a global spectrum are coming together with the contemporaries of the NOW. This exhibition creates new Memoryscapes (digital, locational, imagined) that touches the academic debates of memory and diverse belongings, mobility and migration, conflict and violence with a queer perspective, inviting audiences to reflect on the factors influencing the significance of women’s memories, restrictions on certain recollections, and the connection of their experiences to the global social-political landscape over the past century.

(Linn Zhang, curator)

This all-women global show creates a genuine dialogue between a generation of young artists currently active in London with outstanding works by pioneering artists from the Modern era. This intergenerational and intercultural meeting focuses on shared themes like diaspora, posttraumatic narratives and modern spiritualism, leading to innovative sites in the artists’ works invested in reflexive and critical nostalgia, and in related emancipatory discourses such as feminism, queerness and new ecological consciousness. It is exciting to discover and explore the intimate and intuitive links in the works of young women artists today to the special futurity of their avant-garde forerunners, – a critical female lineage of shared and updated aesthetic, political and spiritual concerns.

(Anke Kempkes, curator)

Featured artists: Alice Rahon (1904 Chenecey-Buillon – 1987 Mexico City, Mexico), Aiko Miyawaki (1929, Tokyo, Japan – 2014, Konogawa, Japan), Feliza Bursztyn (1933 Bogotá, Colombia – 1982), Linjing Peng (b. 1993, Chengdu (China), lives and works in London (UK), Marissa Stoffer (b. 1988, Dutch-born Scottish, lives and works in Scotland (UK), Mira Schendel (1919, Zurich, Switzerland - 1988, Sao Paulo, Brazil), Nicolaas Warb (1906 Amsterdam, Netherlands -1957, Paris, France), Romany Eveleigh (1934, London, UK – 2020, Rome, Italy), Sonja Sekula (1918, Lucerne – 1963, Zürich, Switzerland), Woo Jung Ghil (b. Seoul, 1992, lives and works in London) and Wenyun Xiong (b. 1955, Chongqing, China, lives and works in Beijing and Chengdu, China).

In the 1950s Western artists in the abstract avant-gardes reconceptualized Asian culture and philosophy – a form of Modern Buddhism – as the stylistic paradigm of modernism, where spirituality was a central engagement and an antidote to the atrocities of WWII and to the new cultural-political regressions and conservatism. The show creates an intergenerational dialogue between previously forgotten female artists who were in part active from the 1940s and from the 1960s in Europe, Central America, the United States and Japan, engaging with a poetic, surreal, spiritualist and existentially charged language of abstraction, with contemporary East-Asian artists invested in postcolonial, identity political and spiritual approaches to abstraction, creating an altogether new expression and vision.

This exhibition explores forms of historic and contemporary diasporic, as well as speculative and imaginative nostalgia, unfolding and emerging as “enigmatic, chaotic, incoherent, and structurally contradictory attachments“ (Berlant, 2011) in proximate, distant and non-linear space and time configurations: past, present and future. A critical understanding of nostalgia “challenges us to ask what exactly it is that we most want to imagine.”

For over 300 years, western scholars have debated the concept of nostalgia, originally seen as a medical condition associated with negative feelings such as depression and homesickness. Nostalgia has evolved to be defined as a longing for familiar surroundings or past experiences. While traditionally associated with the past, some argue that nostalgia can also be anticipated, with individuals expecting to feel nostalgic about future events. The concept of nostalgia is contested, with some depicting it as a catalyst for social change and others arguing it as a way to revive marginalized histories and traditions. Collective nostalgia often arises during uncertain times and can be linked to ethnic nationalism and populist radical right movements. Recent studies suggest that collective nostalgia is characterized by a sense of loss, idealization of the past, and resentment towards the present. The concept of "productive nostalgia," involves actively seeking to recover and incorporate elements of the past into the present and future. This form of nostalgia enlivens memory as a contemporary spatial practice.

This all-women show uses nostalgia as the starting point of the curation, this exhibition explores the concept of nostalgia from a queer perspective with transnational agendas in visual art and feminist geography, investigates what women can and cannot remember and why, who gives value to women’s memories, whether are their conditions under which women are forbidden to remember and how their experience relates to the global social- political environment in the last 100 years. The exhibition creates an intergenerational and transcultural dialogue between abstract artists from East Asia and the West, – a meeting of artists from the Modern era with young London-based artists.

In this exhibition, the contestation of nostalgia becomes the intersection of political, de-colonial, post-traumatic and eco-poetical landscapes, featuring female artists of a global spectrum experimenting with Abstract Expressionism are coming into centre perspective now along the lines of the unconscious, gender and post-traumatic experience. This exhibition captures a snapshot of cultural discourse in relation to gender, sexuality and race of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century in the neo-globalised and post-globalised world.

Borrowed from a poem written by the renowned ancient Chinese female poet 1(1084-1155, China), the literary Chinese translation of the exhibition title, "妒⻛笑月" (dù fēng xiào yuè) captures the moving image of beauty that lies in the heart of freedom, something poets might get jealous of, something that transcends the contemporaries of their own time, response to the English title, creating an intercultural interaction between languages across time and space - highlights the shared desire and imagination of women for centuries across the globe.

1950 marked a period in the Western art world of an intense search for spiritual and metaphysical models and subsequently an intense projection on oriental philosophies. Zen Buddhist principles appeared as Asian-inflected modern abstraction and as a projective Western neo-orientalism in the works of Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Michael (Corinne) West, Sam Francis, Agnes Martin, Charmion von Wiegand, John Cage, and Ray Johnson, to name a few, and in the paintings and poetry of two artists in this show: the Swiss-Jewish Sonja Sekula whose family had immigrated in 1938 to New York where she became part of the milieu of late Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, and the Dutch Constructivist painter Nikolaas Warb (b. Sophie Warburg) who lived in Paris and increasingly embraced a spiritualist dimension in her geometric and biomorph abstraction. Young Asian artists on the other hand – like the gutai formation – reinterpreted traditional Oriental philosophy in new ways processing previous disruptive experiences of totalitarian regimes and atomic warfare: they politicised the “void” as a post-traumatic space, “nothingness” as a dimension that conceals vast contents within and conceptualised “silence” as carrying the very presence of the unspeakable or the politically suppressed, – a perspective that was shared by New York artists Sonja Sekula, John Cage and Michael (Corinne) West.

Paris-based Japanese painter Imai Toshimitsu was searching for a modern form of Orientalism that would overcome post-colonial subjection and yet be expressed in the universality of the new abstraction: “These qualities must be grasped not merely with an Oriental and non-humanistic concept of nature, but with a modern consciousness and a strong sense of global universality. (...) Together with the collapse of Western rationalism, there is a world trend toward a deep interest in the Orient. Thus, we must abandon our past abject colonial mentality of servile devotion to the West, and actually create works that bring tradition to life through contemporary awareness. We, Oriental people, must discover the unlimited space of void, temporality, colour, and form within the tradition and bring this traditional structure to life within contemporary works in a way that is structurally completely different from the West.”

She had deep insights of truth–a sense of identifying with everything. It was a marvelous criticism of our society that when a person becomes that close to Truth about life in general it is a sign that they should be put away.

(John Cage posthumously on his friend Sonja Sekula, 1971)

The title of this show "Even the poets were jealous of these…" derives from an intimate monochromatic gouache by Sonja Sekula inscribed with this enigmatic and provocative line. Sekula created here a sombre vision of dark figures parading in an imaginative landscape with several black ‘moons’, – the “Sleepwalkers’ wake”. The work is deeply embedded in Surrealist tropes. Andre Breton, a peer and friend of Sekula who lived for some time in his New York studio, considered the sleepwalker to have privileged access to the world of the subconscious and he promoted the famous expression that the true ‘poet works in his sleep’. Sekula’s scenario seems infused with mythological underpinnings. The ‘primitivist’ silhouettes – like Pollock Sekula had studied the culture of the Northern-American Navaho tribe – sketched just of line drawings, walk above and below a stark dark road or a river, maybe the demarcation between the world of the living and the afterlife, or the two osmotic realms of wakefulness and dreamscape. Aside from her alliance with the Surrealists, Sekula had her own deeply personal vision of the sleepwalker’s special dimension, one ‘even envied by the poets’. Like her peer Agnes Martin, the artist was at times haunted by the dark side of the psyche and emotions, possibly and in part inflicted by being a queer woman in a time of political repression in postwar America and later back in the provincial and repressed milieu of Switzerland in the 1950s. However, different to her gay colleagues in the New York postwar avant-garde like Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Elsworth Kelley, Agnes Martin and others, Sekula openly expressed her sexuality in her paintings and poetry. She also spent time in Mexico with other like-minded women artists in the Surrealist milieu like Frida Kahlo and Alice Rahon with whom she was forming a close relationship for some time. Like Sekula, Rahon was a painter and poet and engaged in a painterly universe situated between late Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. Both artists created abstracted fantastical landscapes bearing enigmatic cyphers and traces like imprints of the deeper activities of the mind.

Aiko Miyawaki graduated from Japan Women's University in 1952 and lived and worked as a painter in Europe and North America from 1957-1966: “I lost all interest in stories which have a beginning, and an end, in bold shapes, bright colours“, she said. The tonal two-dimensional works she created in the 1960s expressed this perspective, experimenting with unusual materials like powdered marble to create undulating yet arrested surfaces that, to quote Hayashi Michio, express a 'tension between transformations and something that remains unchanging'.

In Europe, Miyawaki met such experimental and iconoclast artists as Lucio Fontana, Pierre Manzoni and the older Surrealist Man Ray. She developed her first body of work in the late 1950s and early 60s when in transition between Europe and Japan, her intensely opaque painting reliefs mixing enamel and marble powder with paint and applying it directly on canvas often with a palette knife to achieve thickly textured surfaces. Her piece just titled “Work” from 1962, here on show, is composed of golden-bronze repetitive viscid drips like melted matter solidified after a disaster has struck the surface of a landscape. The painting claims its abstract status through the conceptual serial character of the title “Work”, much in the sense of the 1960s neo-avant-garde, nonetheless emanates an unsettling and sombre aura. Its intriguing and impenetrable materiality speaks of layers of sedimented memory and of abstract post-traumatic geography.

Born Jewish in a Catholic country, the child of Polish immigrants, and a feminist in a country dominated by the conservatism of the church, Feliza Bursztyn was an outsider. It was from this position that she witnessed the rapid industrialization occur- ring throughout Latin America in the postwar era. An ardent supporter of the Cuban Revolution, Bursztyn was sceptical of the pervasive enthusiasm among political and cultural elites for developmentalism which, in her view, exacerbated extant social and economic divisions. Married at nineteen and divorced with three children at the age of twenty-four, Bursztyn rejected the circumscribed nature of women’s lives in Colombia and intentionally flouted social mores, embracing the mantle of La Loca (the mad one), as she was dubbed by the press. Her political views informed the material and the content of her sculpture driving her to challenge the social and artistic status quo.

A pioneer in kinetic sculpture, Feliza Bursztyn created wrecked metal sculptures with ghostlike yet comical humanoid traits that addressed the social effects caused by the aggressive modernization of Colombian society. Composed of industrial junk, often motor-animated, these works perform a theatre of dystopian industrial hybrids. Bursztyn’s immersive installations are characterized by their disconcerting mechanical sound produced by the frenetic vibration of the sculptures, as well as by occasional music scores accompanying the pieces. The artist’s works and sculptural mise-en-scènes enact sites of aesthetic resistance and antithetical political investment, creating a unique experience that raises awareness of the situation and the perception of women in a male-dominated society and reveal the troublesome face of modernity.

Mira Schendel (née Myrrah Dagmar Dub) moved in her childhood from Switzerland to Milan where she attended the Catholic University Sacro Coure from 1936. In 1939 she had to leave the university due to the anti-Jewish decree of the fascist Mussolini government. She fled to Sarajevo where, in 1941, she married Osip Hargesheimer, a Croatian Catholic. With him and equipped with a Croatian passport, she returned to Milan in 1944, after which the couple settled in Rome. In 1949 she emigrated to Brazil as a displaced person. In 1950 she began to paint in her new place of residence, Rio de Janeiro. In the same year, she came into contact with Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica from the circle of Brazilian Concretists, who experimented with innovative forms of geometric abstraction. Schendel, however, did not join any of the groups that formed around the concrete-constructivist painting movement in Brazil. She exhibited several times at the prestigious São Paulo Biennial beginning in 1951, where she showed large-scale works, as well as drawings with Chinese calligraphy influenced by Zen Buddhism. In 1954 she met the German emigrant Knut Schendel, who ran the famous bookstore Camuta in São Paulo and whom she later married.

The self-taught artist used the reduced concrete formal language to explore the existential dimensions of emptiness and silence: "To put it another way, my work is an attempt... to give meaning to the ephemeral. To do this, of course, I have to freeze the moment itself ...." (Mira Schendel). Schendel was keenly aware of the barriers that language and culture can create between people. Because of her Jewish heritage, the Italian government revoked her student visa in 1939 and forced her to find another country. By the time she immigrated to Brazil in 1949, she had lived in three countries and spoke six languages. A European immigrant in Brazil, a student of philosophy, and a bibliophile, Schendel found her affinities with poets, theologians, and scientists. The prominent poet and theorist of Concrete Poetry, Heroldo de Campos, with whom Schendel had a close friendship, dedicated a poem to her in the 1970s in which he highlights "the search for the essential in her work”. In this search, he identifies a certain mysticism. He terms her a "metaphysical calligrapher" who has a "perception of the beyond" related to Buddhism.

The Dutch painter Nicolaas Warb (formerly Sophie Warburg) moved to Paris in 1929 where she first work as a stylist at various Paris fashion houses. Pursuing music and her particular interest in jazz, she married Gaston Bathuel, a jazz musician from Martinique who fell in the early years of World War II which deeply affected the artist’s life and work. The painting Exorcism (1947), oscillating elegantly between abstraction and figuration set against a vaguely tropical background, may well meld reflections on the artist’s biography with her liberal and progressive political thinking of the time which was likely also informed by the very influential presence of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire in Paris in the late 1930s. The Césaires were very active in the anti-colonial movement and edited Tropiques, a literary journal theorizing and manifesting a post-colonial Modernism, from Martinique. In 1939 Warb met the former De Stijl artist Georges Vantongerloo and she initially devoted herself entirely to abstraction. After she married again in 1942, her second husband, Francis Nicolas, gave up painting in order to support his wife’s career as an artist. The artist’s wartime adoption of a “male” pseudonym Nicolaas Warb was a deliberate response to the tendency of contemporary male critics to disregard women artists. Shortening her last name from Warburg to Warb, moreover, forestalled speculation—in Vichy France—that she might have a “German” (or Jewish) family background.

Warb wrote her own manifesto, Aperçus et pen-sées sur la peinture abstraite (Insights and Thoughts on Abstract Painting) in 1942. After the war she became a member of the newly formed group Espace, which called for the incorporation of Constructivism and Neo-plasticism into urban planning and the social fabric and for synthesizing the arts more generally. Launched by the artist and magazine editor André Bloc, Espace considered all the arts as social phenomena and staked a claim for architecture and the related arts to address social concerns. In the 1950s, however, Warb infused her abstraction increasingly with philosophical and poetic content. “(She was) seeking to introduce spirituality into geometric form“ wrote the influential critic and impressario of the abstract art scene in France Michel Seuphor in his obituary for Warb in 1957 after she had died untimely of cancer age 51. Warb saw abstract art as having a moral and spiritual role: to uplift humanity and foster an understanding of balance and harmony. Over time Warb increasingly would introduce personal intuition into her work. She returned to Goethe’s Farbenlehre of 1810, in which he explored the power of colors to touch the soul and arouse emotion. Esoteric topics, far-Eastern philosophy, and Buddhism became central concerns to her. The intimate geometric composition “Rien n’est reel” (Nothing is real) from 1950 is a testimony to her increasingly philosophical and yet playful abstraction showing strong traces of anthropomorphic from: One can easily identify a figure involved in a dance or in fending off external forces attempting to invade its environment and integrity. French philosopher Raymond Bayer reflected on Warb’s aesthetics in his Entretiens sur l’Art Abstrait in 1964: “The question is whether she seeks fulfilment in depersonalization or in the fulfilment of her personality; it is probably both at the same time. She only feels truly free when realizing herself, but realizing herself means depersonalizing herself. There are two theses at work here, and they mark two families of thought. [One is] a dissolution in the impersonal, that is, in the universal world of universal forms. But for Warb, dissolution is perhaps not to be found in this idea of an abstract and universal world of forms. On the contrary, it is perhaps in the expression of the most personal kind of nuance that Warb at a certain point finds her ecstasy and her dissolution. These two dynamics are not in fact incompatible, for both families of thought are to be found among the mystics. There are the mystics of reason, who pass through the world of forms in a certain desire for union with the universal… In other words, there is a mysticism of sensibility and a mysticism of intelligence.“

Born in London, abstract painter Romany Eveleigh was a nomadic character. She spent the last 40 years of her life in Rome, embracing a minimalist aesthetic that nonetheless bears traces of expressiveness. Eveleigh was a reclusive figure. However, in 1963, she performed in Ibiza a 'happening’ with Salvador Dali when she met the photojournalist Anna Baldazzi, who was to become her long-life partner and wife. It was Baldazzi who introduced Eveleigh to the radical feminist movement led by the lesbian activist Michèle Causse, one of the artist's early champions.

Eveleigh’s almost monochromatic yet thickly layered paintings show a “muted earthly palette” and are of a human scale” (Barbara Rose). The marks and traces appearing on the edges are gestural brushstrokes, lines, and scratches. These traces are “residues” of a process that starts off as conceptual “clarity”, but then fades, like “discarded skin of snaking thought” (Eveleigh), to transform into an opaque surface that does not offer itself to a one-dimensional insight.

Repeated gesture seeks identity and difference within a system of meaning... More, repetition reveals difference, and the idea of ‘making’ difference suggests that the labour involved in creative expression is equal in value to processes of ideation and so underscores the role of the body and of time and circumstance in creation: The relation of mind and matter…of consciousness as it derives from language and through an embodied relation to the world.

(Cheryl Simon)

Wenyun Xiong, born in 1955 in Chongqing, China, is an artist currently residing and working in Beijing and Chengdu, China. At the age of 16, as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement during the Cultural Revolution, Xiong Wenyun went to Aba Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, China. She worked, studied, and lived in Wenchuan for 8 years. After the movement ended, she entered the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1979, and after graduating, she taught at Southwest Normal University. In 1985, she studied traditional Chinese painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. In 1987, she went to Japan to specialize in Japanese painting and obtained a Master's degree in art from Tsukuba University after years of dedicated study.

In her 4 decades of artistic practice, Xiong Wenyun's works have been deeply influenced by her early life in the Aba Tibetan region. The themes of the relationship between humans and nature, life and death, are integrated into her artistic creations throughout. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Xiong Wenyun took care of her mother who was hospitalized with pneumonia. She was isolated in the hospital ward for nearly a month, and this experience became a catalyst for her new artwork. In the small space of the ward, after her mother rested at night, Xiong Wenyun used the back of the medicine boxes her mother had consumed to record the details of her surroundings. After her mother was discharged from the hospital, Xiong Wenyun began her new artistic creation. This series of works about hospitals, wards, and medicine boxes is Xiong Wenyun's response to this challenging period from her unique perspective. "I choose to paint medicine boxes because, in my opinion, they represent something that accompanies most people towards the end." In Xiong Wenyun's memories from childhood to adulthood, her mother has always had poor health, and their lives revolved around illness, medication, with the house always filled with many drugs. Her mother lived frugally and had a habit of cutting off the used medicine boxes to use as notepads. She also categorized and recorded the key points summarized from health books and her own experiences in dealing with illnesses on these notepads. This is also the reason why the artist started creating the "Medicine Box" series in 2019.

Marissa Stoffer is a Scottish-based multi-disciplinary artist and teacher. In 2014 Marissa graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in Fine Art (History of Art and Painting). She began MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2019, pausing her studies for two years due to the pandemic, and completing the degree in 2023. Her practice centres on ecology, plants, and our complex relationships with them. Inspired by her upbringing and residencies she has attended in remote wild locations, she searches for a collective sense of belonging and connection through the stories of plants. To do this she has been foraging for colour, researching native species of plants (specifically trees and “weeds”) and how their stories entwine with our own cosmologies through myth, folklore, and science. It is a practice that links to kinship and reciprocity. Her process of making aligns itself with feminist ecology, and how the stories of women & nature have had relations for thousands of years. By returning to this history, explored through a method of making and colour, Marissa wonders whether an art practice can be animistic, adopting non-human perspectives for an inter-relational, multi-species understanding of the existence of other life beyond the self. Looking to science, craft, and spiritualism Marissa explores semiotics as a means to interpret her experiences, memories, and thoughts conjured by flora and fauna. She sees her practice as quiet resistance to capitalism and searches for sustainability and inclusion through ancient arts and crafts.

My works are a window into the realm of jeongjeok— a sanctuary where time slows down, where the external distractions fade, and where my soul rests.

(Woo Jung Ghil)

Woo Jung Ghil, a recent graduate from the Royal Academy of Art MFA class of 2023, expresses silence through her paintings. Her practice embraces Jeongjeok, internal tranquillity rejecting external sounds. Amidst the ever-changing world, she remains resolute. Layers of fading colours embody internal calmness. Painting is her meditation, exploring silence as a nexus of potent forces, reminiscing and daydreaming merge within the canvas. Liberation is found in the fluidity, vastness, and emptiness of her art. Through blending, scratching, and rubbing, she evokes the seduction of silence—an infinite loop of human emotions. Ghil's works suffuse feelings with mystifying colours and delicate textures, creating a visual and performative experience leading to sought-after silence.

Growing up across cultures, Ghil strives to establish her subjectivity and focus on what truly matters. Nature's stillness inspires her aesthetics — mountains and water symbolise unwavering spirit. In their resoluteness and determination, she finds the timeless silence of Jeongjeok. Meticulous layers, textures, and colours in her paintings reflect a profound dialogue. Sinuous lines maintain balance, discipline, and sought-after silence. Ghil's art offers a glimpse into Jeongjeok—a sanctuary where time slows, distractions fade, and the soul finds solace.

Linjing Peng is a multimedia artist now based in London. Peng’s practice narrates subjectivity through ceramics, sound, painting, and sewing. The confessional nature of her practice is an integral part of Peng’s self-healing journey. Peng’s fascination with the universe serves as a muse for their art. She finds beauty and peace in cosmic themes, and this connection allows her to create art that reflects the vastness, complexity, and mystery of the universe, a way to connect with something greater than oneself. Peng uses ceramics as a medium to process past experiences and heal. Her sculptures not only represent personal trauma but also celebrate the resilience and strength that comes after overcoming adversity. It's a powerful message about the potential for growth through difficult experiences. Peng believes in the transformative power of art. Her psychoanalytic process is translated into forms that strive to convey a sense of ambiguity and fragility, reflecting the complexities and contradictions of the human experience. By using organic forms and textures to evoke a sense of the body and the natural world, connections are drawn between the internal and external realms.

Linn Zhang, b. Chengdu (China), lives and works in London, is a researcher in human geography, as well as an emerging curator who has collaborated with Christie’s for her curation The Landscape of One’s Own, staged in March 2023 in London, including artists Alvaro Barrington (Commisioned by Tate Britain for 2024), Stanislava Kovalcikova, Yingming Chen (New Contemporary 2023 listed) etc. Linn is also a gifted poet and her work has been used by Berlin/Milan- based art gallery Peres Project in 2021. Linn has lived in Europe for 15 years where she studied in the UK, Switzerland, and France, and she is now based in London. Her background is in the field of creative & and cultural entrepreneurship as well as cultural theories where she specialises in gender and sexuality from a human geography perspective, which is heavily reflected in her curation. With her unwavering dedication to intellectual growth and pursuit of knowledge, Linn is currently pursuing a PhD at Durham University (UK) in the Department of Geography under the supervision of Professor Ben Anderson and Professor Anna Secor. Lin's research interests include Affect and Politics, Creative Geographies, Cultural Geography, Political Geography, Gender, Queer theory, and Geographies of Climate Change.

​Anke Kempkes, b. Germany lives and works in Switzerland, is an internationally active Curator, Art Historian and Critic. She has lived in Switzerland since 2021. Her areas of expertise are: Female Avant-Garde, 20th-century Abstraction Movements (Bauhaus, Concrete Art, Avant-Garde in Central and Latin America), Surrealism, Minimal Dance and Music Avant-garde in the U.S., Queer Modernism and Performativity. Since her studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she has published in international art publications and participated in numerous conferences. She has published on Alina Szapocznikow, Mária Bartuszova, Verena Loewensberg, Heidi Bucher, Evelyne Axell, Rosemarie Castoro, Wanda Czelkowska, Lydia Okumura, Teresa Murak, Teruko Yokoi and Stanislava Kovalcikova, among others. Anke has held numerous positions in world prestigious art institutions such as Chief Curator at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, as Lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in Art History and Theory, and as Director of Instituto Su​sch and Curator at Large at Muzeum Susch, Switzerland.