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Kirsty Bell is a British-American writer and art critic living in Berlin. She has published widely in magazines and journals including Tate Etc. and Art in America, and was contributing editor of frieze from 2011-2021. She was awarded a Warhol Foundation Grant for her book The Artist's House, and her essays have appeared in over seventy exhibition catalogues for major international museums and institutions such as the Whitney Museum for American Art, The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and Tate, UK. Her approach to writing is rooted less in her degree in Art History and English Literature from Cambridge University (1990-93) than in her hands-on experience with contemporary art production, while working in galleries and curating exhibitions.
'It is easy to be carried along by these submerged currents, by the momentum of the prose, the motion through a resisting city. As in other classics of urban discovery, the personal becomes universal, and the past that demands to live in the present is revealed like a shining new reef. As we return, time and again, to the solitary figure at the window.' - Iain Sinclair, author of London Orbital 'With The Undercurrents, Kirsty Bell does for Berlin what Lucy Sante has done for New York and Rebecca Solnit for San Francisco; she tells the stories recorded in the city's stone and water, and in the hearts of its inhabitants. Her profound and idiosyncratic chronicle of Berlin is an act of hydromancy, divining a history of love and loss from the water that flows beneath and between the city's bricks.' - Dan Fox, author of Limbo 'I read this watery, engrossing book in the bath, following along as Kirsty Bell's reflective curiosity leads her onward along the Landwehr canal, in and out of the archives, novels, memoirs, and stories of her building and her neighbourhood. Evocative and fascinating, The Undercurrents is a liquid psychogeography of Berlin that had me mulling over the psychic charge of place not only where Bell lives, but where I live too.' - Lauren Elkin, author of Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London 'Kirsty Bell has achieved a real work of art: She tells of Berlin's sunken past as a freshly emerged present - and she explains the energy of this city from the history of the people, the streets, and the hopes that have shaped it.' - Florian Illies, author of 1913: The Year before the Storm 'From the first moment I heard Kirsty Bell read from her writing, I have yearned for the book she was then working on. And now here it is, perfect and perfectly balanced, a clear-eyed and beautifully written account about place, about consciousness. I treasure The Undercurrents, and so will you.' - Hilton Als, author of White Girls 'With sleuthing interest and novelistic flair, Kirsty Bell's The Undercurrents has ruptured familiar terrain. The book's subject, Berlin, is portrayed as a thing in motion, captured through a compound lens of culture, hard history and memoir.... an associative thesis on the dangers of repression, from gargantuan acts of genocide to the comparatively subtle shames of familial collapse.' - frieze
