Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess

Anna Mendelssohn (b. 1948—d. 2009) authored poetry, fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist, musician and translator. From 1971 to 1977 she served time at Holloway Prison in London due to her involvement in extreme leftist activism. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed fifteen poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics, among them, Parataxis, Critical Quarterly, and Jacket. Her work appeared in seminal anthologies including Denise Riley’s Poets on Writing (1992), Iain Sinclair’s Conductors of Chaos (1996), and Rod Mengham and John Kinsella’s Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004). Often situated within the British Poetry Revival, Mendelssohn retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England, where she lived from 1983 until her death. In 2010, her vast archive of writings and drawings was generously donated by her three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex.

Asymmetry is an independent non-profit foundation dedicated to nurturing curatorial practices and the development of cultural knowledge in and about Asia through global exchange. The Curatorial Fellowships place curators in pioneering European institutions, sharpening their skills and expanding their networks, whilst enabling the institutions to gain from the Fellow’s specific expertise and perspective on Chinese and East Asian contemporary art. By facilitating international opportunities for curators and academics from this region, Asymmetry seeks to integrate Chinese and East Asian contemporary art and curatorial practice into a wider art world discourse.