“I don’t find thinking in terms of disciplines useful” – Interview with Anne Küper
Anne Küper was awarded the prestigious AICA Prize for Young Art Critics together with Alicja Schindler in 2025. The prize, endowed with 12,000 euros, was unanimously and exceptionally split by the high-calibre jury – consisting of the art critics Laszlo Glozer, Sophia Roxane Rohwetter and Ellen Wagner, the art theorist Kerstin Stakemeier and the writer Ann Cotten – to honor the diversity of current trends in art criticism. The jury emphasized Anne Küper’s “linguistic dexterity” as well as her “breaking open of disciplines”. Her texts prove that art criticism becomes particularly lively when it is based on her own embodied experience and addresses the struggle to write about art. Küper moves between different artistic worlds. Her texts appear in the Tagesspiegel, CARGO and Filmbulletin. In addition to her critical work, she also works as a director and performer and researches intimate relationships with chatbots at Ruhr University Bochum. We spoke to Anne Küper about the state of art criticism, working across disciplines and her fascination with evil.
I believe that there is no such thing as art criticism as one entity and probably never has been. Critical thinking and writing take place in many different places – what happens there can be quite exciting. I don’t mean that the conditions under which freelance writers work don’t urgently need to change, or who can actually afford to work as art critics because of these conditions. But I do notice a certain refusal on my part to answer the question of where I stand exclusively on the basis of the mute constraints of economic conditions and thus to have to submit to them myself, as I often observe in such interviews when it comes to “art criticism today”. For this reason, I would prefer to advocate a diversity of forms, the joy of experimentation, curiosity, and networking that I, as a reader, would like to see more of.
I often ask myself this question, so my answer can only be provisional for the moment: I would assume that I have an understanding of artistic production processes due to my work in the performative arts. Writing is also such a process. For me, it doesn’t just mean writing down how I found something, but rather represents a movement of thought. Only by writing can I think, approach certain staging decisions and relate to them, precisely because I have to find formulations for them. But I am not alone in this. Writing is a constantly new, exciting, collective process. And in this way, writing is perhaps not so dissimilar to the way I have worked in the theater so far.
I would be more interested in how you would answer the question after reading it, rather than me giving an explanation of my writing, which probably can’t be true to what I’m doing there. For me, it’s about making the conditions under which I write recognizable, and that it’s me who writes, with this one body that I have. But why don’t you read my texts and get in touch with me afterwards? I’d love that.
I don’t find thinking in terms of disciplines useful. I write about what interests me. That can be films, exhibitions, books, songs, memes and more. I try to take all of this seriously as statements about the world, which can certainly push in different directions without being mutually exclusive – that’s what I try to do with my texts. I am very happy about the award and can only thank the jury from the bottom of my heart.
I’ve been very preoccupied with evil in recent weeks. Satan to be precise. The Austrian performance artist and choreographer Teresa Vittucci has contributed significantly to this because I saw her performance SANE SATAN. In it, she explores the figure of the devil from a queer, pop-culturally informed perspective. She celebrates the seductive, the unpredictable, the moist, the dripping, the otherness. Through Vittucci, hell has become a place for me that I definitely don’t want to miss.
Art lies in the cellars.
