Anselm Franke


Anselm Franke is a German curator, and writer. He has been the head of Visual Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013.

Life and career

Franke was born in Heiligenberg. He holds a PhD in Visual Cultures/Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He started his career as assistant director to Christoph Schlingensief.
Franke worked as a curator of interdisciplinary research projects and festivals in several theatres, including: the Volksbühne am Rose-Luxemburg-Platz and Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin until 2006, often in collaboration with Hannah Hurtzig. From 2001–2006, he worked at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, where he curated numerous exhibitions, among them, Territories, along with Eyal Weizman, Rafi Segal and Stefano Boeri in 2004 and No matter how bright the light, the crossing occurs at night, along with artists Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ines Schaber and Judith Hopf in 2005. Later, he was artistic director at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp from 2006–2010, where he curated exhibitions such as Self-Fashion Show, Mimétisme and Drawing Documents. His multi-chapter exhibition project, Animism, shown in Bern, Antwerp, Vienna and Berlin.
Since 2013, Franke is listed among the 100 most powerful people in the artworld in the yearly ranking by the ArtReview.

Selected exhibitions