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We first encountered the work of anne krul during a public talk in 2023, within which she projected an image of a truly abstract, colourful painting and stated, dryly yet comedically, ‘This is a depiction of what it is like to work in an institution’. Hooked by the absurdity, laughs followed, as did the immediate feeling that krul had a very embodied understanding of the importance of rendering often illegible experience visible through abstraction.

As a Black visual artist, writer, poet and activist, krul was active throughout the 1990s in various LGBTI+ and women’s organisations, including the International Lesbian Information Service (ILIS), ZAMI—a self-organising initiative for and by black, migrant and refugee women —and Strange Fruit the Real—a queer collective active in the Netherlands from 1989–2002 that supported gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans youth from different cultural backgrounds. With a focus on a non-hierarchical self-help approach, these organisations offered support and conversation without taking the role of experts. Rather, they used creative discourse, activism, art and poetry to effect change. Throughout these many years of organising, and in the spirit of working with art and poetry as a tool for change, krul was also always working away on her solo artistic practice. Spanning painting, video collage, slide installations, sculpture, audio works and anagram poetry, this aspect of krul’s work is widely undercirculated and little known—despite the fact that her political work was so instrumental in ensuring better living conditions for so many young people in the Netherlands.

With this in mind, ANAGRAMMA TICS takes the form of an unconventional retrospective, wherein the various facets and outputs of krul’s practice—anagram poetry, art making, education, organising, collaboration and intergenerational dialogue—will be on show for many to see for the very first time. To make this exhibition, krul has worked with artist and typographer Tabea Nixdorff, a pre-existing collaboration which has seen the pair produce new audio works while also translating krul’s anagram poems—a type of poetry made with the guiding principle that either each line or each verse is written with the same set of letters as all other lines or verses in the poem—into spatial installations and sculptures, building on their overlapping interests in poetry and found language, as well as the restrictions inherent to writing.

Joining krul and Nixdorff is Unica Zürn (1916–1970), an author and artist remembered for her works of anagram poetry and automatic drawing. A key component of the exhibition will be a reading space centred around an anagram poetry archive that krul has been building since the 1990s, within which Zürn acts as both a guiding inspiration and leading figure. To honour Zürn’s influence on krul, to ‘sit alongside each other’, as krul puts it, a collection of her publications and works on paper will be on display, evidencing the dialogical commitment inherent to krul’s practice: if it wasn’t for Zürn, she notes, she wouldn’t be making anagram poems.

Throughout the exhibition, unedited image collections turn into films, the detritus of social poetry gatherings becomes slide projections, hoarded objects are refigured as asemic writing and words and their corresponding letters are literally disorganised on the page, arriving at both new configurations of meaning and a refusal of meaning all together. What results is an expression of experience, both the experience of grappling with language on a personal level— ‘language is a virus’, krul asserts to us—and the instrumentalisation of language on an institutional level, a reference to the social disciplining of so-called ‘deviant’ or ‘abnormal’ behaviour via language throughout history. It is here where krul began writing anagram poems in the first place as, in learning from Zürn, it was a way to live with all her voices. Put frankly, in this exhibition, erroneous and unruly language is a practice of defiance worthy of celebration.