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.
Two dresses worthy of a femme fatale, a mix and match between designs from the 60s and 70s that are far too long for the normal human body but perfect for a fantastical being. A collage of screenshots from the artist’s Facebook wall dating back a decade or so have been printed onto silk. This cross-section in time through the artist’s digital life shows a semi-fictional record. Amidst logos, messages and posts, she hints at the slightly untrendy nature of Facebook, whose golden era came to an end with the arrival of other social networks. The sheer variety of these networks has given rise to quite different user behaviours and motivations, depending on age or socio-economic category. According to a survey published in 2015 by the US think-tank Pew Research Center, 51% of teens whose parents earned less than 30,000 dollars a year used Facebook, whilst others were gravitating towards Instagram or TikTok. It would appear that even within digital pop culture it’s possible to identify distinctions between low and high culture through the various media and platforms used. Unfashionable but still a must-have, according to French daily le Monde, Facebook has gone from being a treasure trove for online communities to a marketplace where small ads rub shoulders with advertisements run by multinational corporations.
