“I am never not researching” – In Conversation with Alicja Schindler
Alicja Schindler was awarded the prestigious AICA Prize for Young Art Critics in 2025, which she shares with Anne Küper. The high-caliber jury – consisting of art critics Laszlo Glozer, Sophia Roxane Rohwetter and Ellen Wagner, art theorist Kerstin Stakemeier and writer Ann Cotten – unanimously decided to split the 12,000 euro prize in order to do justice to the diversity of current trends in art criticism. The jury praised Schindler’s work in particular for its “thematic range as well as the originality and inventiveness with which she develops formats from her subjects and encounters”. According to the jury, her texts embody an approach that draws on her own experiences and reflects the struggle to speak and write about art. Schindler’s art criticism and portraits appear in renowned publications such as Artforum, Berliner Zeitung, Monopol, Tagesspiegel and ZEIT Online. In addition to her work as a freelance journalist, she works as an editorial assistant for the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft and as a freelancer for the weekly newspaper “der Freitag”. She is currently preparing her doctorate in art history. In conversation with Alicja Schindler, we discuss the precarious situation of the arts section, her work for the 13th Berlin Biennale, and her fascination with artists like Cemile Sahin, who work at the boundaries of different media.
Not so well! The space for the feature section is shrinking. What’s more, there are still too few female authors, and most of the articles are written by men. Exhibition reviews are becoming increasingly rare. There is more space for literature and theater, and more and more often the feature section deals with explicitly political topics from a cultural perspective. This is good in itself, but it would be nice to have more space overall so that the reviews can also be accommodated. I think that could also be shorter formats, such as the “Critic’s Picks” at Artforum. These reviews only have a maximum of 300 words. In my opinion, there is no similarly concise format in this country. The fact that fewer exhibition reviews are being printed does not only apply to the German-speaking media. Streaming tips are currently taking over in the New York Times. The pay is also very poor. If I wrote about politics, my texts would be better paid. I can’t make a living from art criticism, even if I would like to. But the jobs that finance your life and take up most of your time have to be well chosen. After all, art critics are still expected to be as objective as possible.
I currently work 80 percent as an editor for the 13th Berlin Biennale. I write at the weekend and on my day off during the week. My work as an editorial assistant is project-based, on the two annual publication dates of the Journal of Media Studies, so I can organize it well. The exposé for my dissertation is currently in my desk drawer.
It’s often the case that you don’t categorize what you do yourself and only when someone from outside describes your work do you understand a little better what you’re actually doing. That’s how it is for me in this case. I think I understand what the AICA jury is referring to: in my portraits – which I actually prefer to write – I often meet artists in preparation for an exhibition, so this encounter in the studio results in a format that oscillates between portrait, exhibition review or preview and the topic dealt with in each case. A good example of this is my portrait of Marta Dyachenko, which appeared in ZEIT Online. I was able to describe many related political and historical topics in the piece about the encounter and her exhibition: It was about architecture, the history of the Volksbühne and Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, East-West relations and the war in Ukraine. All of this emerged from the conversation about her artworks. And that’s exactly what I like: when (political) themes emerge from the art and not the other way around.
Both are mutually benefitial. Academic writing and philosophical questions also accompany me in my everyday life and sharpen my vision and perception. I need such questions – about art, politics and philosophy – to occupy me in my life. I am never not researching. But not in the sense of being active in the library, but in the sense of looking at the world. I have my eye on a topic and then the references come up like a domino effect, you go from one text to the next, find clues by chance, it’s often like the work of a detective. Sometimes I also think that it can’t be a coincidence, for example when I visit someone at home for the first time and, while looking through the bookshelf, I come across a title that suddenly takes me further. The same applies to writing art criticism, but here the pace of my work is faster. Less basso continuo than first violin. Because the texts appear at shorter intervals, there is always a direct link to the readership and current political discourses as well as those from the art world. When I write art criticism, I want my texts to be understandable – even for people who might not go to an exhibition every weekend – and at the same time dense enough to tell something to people who deal with art on a daily basis. I would actually have the same expectations of academic writing, but it still seems to me to be very much made for the ivory tower. The formal framework within which you can write a dissertation reinforces this. Maybe that’s why my exposé is still in the drawer. I would rather write texts that many different people read and are interested in, and perhaps open up new fields and perspectives for them, rather than for the same, often privileged researchers. Of course, it would be best if you could write and publish scientific texts in such a way that they reach diverse groups of people. But I doubt that a less formal form of academic writing would be sufficient for this.
I have just finished an exciting research project on contemporary ceramic sculptures. My encounters with the artists have led me to the theories of the philosopher Silvia Federici and the author Ursula K. Le Guin, which have shed light on the interweaving of capitalism with witch-hunts (Federici) and vessels as man’s first technological achievements instead of phallic spears (Le Guin). That was exciting in relation to ceramics. I’m currently researching TGL colors – the counterpart to RAL colors in the GDR. I came across this because I am currently writing a catalog text for a painter, Johanna Silbermann, and her paintings are all in very muted colors. She grew up in the GDR and I thought about how it could be that, as she put it, “there were no real colors in the GDR”. I also spent a lot of time looking at Cemile Sahin’s work, as I wrote a review and a portrait about her. She works as a filmmaker, author and artist. I find it interesting how the genres complement and overlap in her work. I also recently wrote about an exhibition of photographs by the writer Annie Ernaux. Ernaux doesn’t actually take photos. It was a one-off, but she even wrote a book of essays about it. In writing about these photos, she then worked out philosophical aspects about photography (and about writing based on photography) as if in passing. Such marginal phenomena and overlaps interest me. At the moment, of course, I’m also thinking a lot about the curatorial concept of the 13th Berlin Biennale. It’s about the ability of a work of art to define its own laws and the role that humor plays in this.
