Stäcker uses video and photography to examine psychologies and histories of the urban environment, often influenced by literature, cinema and poetry.
From Random Discoveries, an investigation of streets with female names, 2020
Her recent video works Invisible Cities, 2024 and City Tales, 2025 were inspired by the postmodernist, experimentalist writer Italo Calvino. They describe aspects of Sydney as a contemporary metropolis and trace its colonial history through artifacts and architecture, as well as Indigenous manifestations of resilience. The videos investigate infrastructure and its impact on people, revealing paradoxes and ambiguities of human existences in this city.
Her work touches upon questions about time and space, transience, fragility, embedded in the reality of urban life.
At the beginning of 2020, just a month before the Pandemic, Stäcker started a photography and writing project, researching and visiting streets with female names in Sydney. The journal describes the encounters in the streets and also gives an insight into the life changes and anxieties of these days. Part of this work was shown in a solo exhibition at Articulate project space in April 2021. The journal is published as a blog on this website: Random Discoveries, an investigation of streets with female names in Sydney.
In her urban photography, at a time when Sydney still had many undeveloped areas, she investigated what she calls zones of uncertainty, derelict industrial or residential sites, wastelands, back lanes and deserted streets at night.
She says, “I consider such places as uncertain because they are transient. They are not what they were before and not yet what they may become. This connects them to my perception of childhood, which is a time of transition and uncertainty, especially when you are born in post-war Germany. But I think uncertainty can be a good thing. It raises questions and offers opportunities for visions and imagination. There is an inherent freedom.”
Anke Stäcker has a particular interest in collaborating with artist-run spaces with experimental and innovative agendas and is an active member of the board of Sydney’s Articulate project space (aps).
Stäcker is a member of the Australian Walking Artists network, founded by Molly Wagner in 2023 and took part in the inaugural survey exhibition Way Beyond in February 2024 at Articulate project space which travelled to the WayOut Artspace, Kandos in 2025. https://www.australianwalkingartists.org
She has been a finalist in various prestigious Australian award exhibitions, including the Helen Lempriere Travelling Award, the inaugural ‘Sydney Looking Forward’ exhibition in Hyde Park, Sydney, now renamed ‘Australian Life’, the Alice Prize from the Alice Springs Art Foundation, the Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Award. She obtained a Master of Visual Arts from the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney in 2000.