Hello, world. Welcome to my site.
My name is Anna-Sophie Springer. I am a cultural theorist, curator, publisher, and educator working at the intersection of artistic practice, environmental humanities, and the histories of culture and science. Through exhibitions, books, and public programs, my work investigates the material and political dimensions of how knowledge is produced, collected, and experienced. Since 2011, I have directed K. Verlag, a Berlin-based publishing atelier exploring the book-as-exhibition. My research-driven curatorial practice involves close collaborations with artists, archives, and scientific collections to produce layered ecologies of attention—foregrounding difficult conversations and confronting the geopolitical and epistemological imaginaries of nature.
Together with Etienne Turpin, I am the principal co-investigator and co-curator of Reassembling the Natural (RN), an ongoing exhibition-led inquiry into the colonial histories and possible futures of natural history collections. Developed over a decade of fieldwork, archival research, and artistic collaborations, its most recent iteration, ponds among ponds, opened at NYU Shanghai’s Institute for Contemporary Arts in March 2021. With support from Germany’s Stiftung Kunstfonds and a research grant from the University of the Arts, Braunschweig (HBK), we are currently consolidating this work in the forthcoming publication, Productions of Nature (Open Humanities Press).
My projects are deeply collaborative, emerging from dialogue, alliances, and co-production with many others. Early exhibitions include EX LIBRIS, which explored relationships between books, libraries, and exhibitions (DE/2013); Ha Ha Road, a touring group exhibition on the subversive power of humor (UK/2011); and 125,660 Specimens of Natural History, an exhibition investigating natural history displays in the context of postnatural and ruined ecologies (Jakarta, 2015). The latter, an early episode of Reassembling the Natural, was realized in collaboration with Komunitas Salihara, the Indonesian Institute of Science, and the Schering Stiftung, working with 13 emerging Indonesian artists and 13 international biologists to revisit Alfred Russel Wallace’s specimen collections through the lens of contemporary plantation economies.
From 2016 to 2018, Reassembling the Natural evolved into an ambitious three-part exhibition cycle, Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald / Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest), shown at the Zoological Museum, CeNak, University of Hamburg (2017–18); the Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T), Humboldt University Berlin (2018); and the Natural History Collections, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (2018). This research-led exhibition expanded Wallace’s collecting journeys beyond Southeast Asia, engaging participants and perspectives from Brazil and other regions. More than 15 international artists contributed, with many commissioned for new works, resulting in multiperspectival exhibitions built into—and against—the existing museum scenarios of our host institutions. A follow-up exhibition, Naturecolony, was planned at The Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto/Mississauga in 2020 but was ultimately canceled due to COVID-19, though one work—Martina Pozzan’s installation—was independently realized.
In parallel, the published volumes of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series have provided an intimate space for discourse, storytelling, and reflection. Co-edited with Etienne Turpin since 2015, the series was commissioned as part of “Das Anthropozän-Projekt” at Haus der Kulturen der Welt and is realized by K. Verlag. In early 2024, my essay Inter Folia, Aves—originally published in intercalations 06 – These Birds of Temptation—was released as a stand-alone book in Spanish translation by Greylock Editions in Barcelona (translated by Blanca Gago). The work examines bird books as paginated exhibitions—both as spaces of colonial capture and epistemic entanglement—and culminates in a decolonial inquiry into interrelation, reciprocity, and ecological thinking in an era of mass extinction.
Although my practice is an ongoing process of disciplined undiscipline, I hold two M.A.s: one in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London (2007) and one in Curatorial Studies from the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig (2013). I completed my practice-led PhD at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture, with a dissertation titled Species of Accumulation & the Necromass of Natural History, supervised by Professor Susan Schuppli and examined by Professors Ros Gray and Lindsay Bremner. My research investigates natural history collections as a planetary architecture of coloniality and ecocidal investment, arguing that the logics of accumulation shaping historical specimen collections persist today in financialized “green” capitalism. Mobilizing eco-feminist, decolonial, and ecopoetic methodologies, my work seeks to transform the necromass of zoological and botanical specimens into a reparative site for multispecies justice and biospheric solidarity.
Over the years, I have taught, lectured, and led workshops at art and design schools, museums, and cultural institutions worldwide. Among the most significant engagements, I was Craig-Kade Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey (2014); Visiting Lecturer at the Institut Kunst, Basel (2016–19), where I taught intensive seminars on ecology, feminism, and artistic research; Dissertation Tutor for the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image at Goldsmiths, University of London (2022); and have been Acting Professor of Transformation Design at the Academy of Fine Arts Braunschweig (HBK) since 2023. In May 2024, I convened a three-day Sommerakademie workshop at Bern Academy of the Arts in Switzerland, which was titled “Publishing Ecologies.”
Beyond my exhibitions and editorial work, my research on libraries and books as curatorial constellations has been published in Art Writing in Crisis (B. Haylock & M. Patty, eds., Sternberg Press, 2021); Fantasies of the Library (A.-S. Springer & E. Turpin, eds., The MIT Press, 2016); and Publishing as Artistic Practice (A. Gilbert, ed., Sternberg Press, 2016). An essay based on my PhD’s first chapter was published in Dark Botany: Herbarium Tales (P. Gibson, S. Jöttkandt et al., eds., Open Humanities Press, 2024). My publishing work with K. Verlag has been honored twice with the Deutscher Verlagspreis [National Publishing Prize] (2020, 2023), awarded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Culture.
For open-access publications, selected public talks, and exhibition summaries, see the resources on this site. For a complete CV, portfolio, individual publications, or an interest in collaboration, editorial projects, or consulting, please contact me via email.
Contact:
mail[at]annasophiespringer[dot]net