Hannah Heilmann ^(DK)

Hannah Heilmann holds a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Copenhagen and teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She works primarily with installation, objects and performance, and has performed at Marselleria, Milano, Manifesta 11, Zürich, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, and the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius. Her work has been presented at ARoS, Aarhus, Møstings Hus, Copenhagen, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Shoot the Lobster, Los Angeles, and EKKM, Tallinn. She co-founded the artistic program space TOVES (2010-2017) and is a former member of the artist group Ingen Frygt (2001-2010). Her works are in collections including SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Kunstmuseum Brandts, and HEART Museum of Contemporary Art.

Heilmann uses her performances and works – often made of cheap, ephemeral materials – to explore our relationship to the object and commodity. The body is set against its surroundings, behavior is on a continuum between a sense of value and acquisitiveness, the gallery can take the form of a showroom, and consumption is connected to both desire and shame.

In connection with Heilmann’s 2021 exhibition A Webshop through the Ages at Ariel in Copenhagen, art critic Mathias Dyhr wrote that she works with surgical precision in the crack “where it is impossible to distinguish between free will and coercion by consistently playing on ambivalence, interaction and repetition.” Through doubt and ambiguity, daydreams and everyday materials, Heilmann criticizes the social and economic systems enmeshing contemporary experience.

Hannah Heilmann lives in Copenhagen.