Johanna Heldebro is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often turns to everyday imagery, monotonous routines and testing the boundaries of the socially accepted. She holds a BFA in Photography from Concordia University, as well as an MFA in Photography from School of Visual Arts (NY), where she was the recipient of the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for her thesis work, To Come Within Reach of You...
Her work has been exhibited throughout Europe and North America, including at MOMENTUM 8: Tunnel Vision - the Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, the Finnish Museum of Photography, 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Galleri Box (SE), Gallery Steinsland Berliner (SE), Khyber Centre for the Arts (CA), Launch F18 (NYC) and side effects gallery (Brooklyn).
Johanna is the co-editor of LAURA, a print arts periodical that she launched together with her long-time collaborator Jared Leon. During her time as director of Art POP, the visual arts component of POP Montreal programming included works/performances/talks by Phil Collins, Cory Arcangel, Elizabeth Price, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Jaimie Warren, Lucky Dragosn, amongst others.
She currently lives in New York City.
A Good Year for the Roses... 2013
A Good Year For the Roses… is primarily a photographic archive of my husband’s possessions initiated in reaction to an event that fundamentally altered my life with him. Large grids of photographs of his objects have been separated into categories—either by type, or colour—and spread out, implying their owner.
At the core of the work is a collection of discarded tissues containing seminal fluid, which I have collected from my husband, each one meticulously weighed, photographed and dated.
The work is defined by obsession; futile and disconnected attempts to possess somebody; desire and the resulting contest between the act of frantically seeking to create/recreate as well as hold onto a true representation of a person, and the undeniable weight of the fact that it can only ever be the trivial effects that can be grasped. Most of all, though, the work is a way to explore, mark, and archive a relationship.
This new work-in-progress draws on text from a postpartum depression study the artist participated in following the births of her children. The work revolves around a series of large-scale flags: borrowing the visual language of signal flags historically used to call for help, and of political flags used to declare public affiliation or allegiance; incorporating phrases that are hyper-personal, even clinical in their intimacy, made monumental and displayed in a form that is inherently public and declarative.
2026
ribbon, thread
25 x 35 inches
Inventory: Sculptures & Familial Interactions 2022 (ongoing)
An ongoing work of found sculptures in domestic spaces and the familial interactions that surrounds them.
Published by LAURA
2025
Vacation Anxiety
Anxiety Vacation 2025
A book of photographs exploring the longing for escape, both physically and metaphorically and the anxiety that this pursuit often results in.
White Death 2010-2016
White Death is a photographic installation inspired by the life of the Finnish Winter War sniper, Simo Häyhä that examines the relationship between the personal and the political. The work is based firmly around Häyhä; the mythological figure who represents, at once, the traditional landowner subsisting as a hunter and farmer (and the narrative of an idyllic simplicity related thereto), and the brutal and inhumane ultra-violence of modern warfare that he, personally, inflicted on the world around him as a sniper who, with calculating and technologically enhanced precision, personally extinguished the lives of 542 other individuals. This “record”, set in a period of 100 days during the winter of 1939-1940, has yet to be surpassed by any other sniper, and earned Häyhä the nickname White Death.
The resulting work is not a historical document, but, rather, an abstraction of this historical figure that I—with forceful and uninhibited freedom—have created.
I have sought to reject the premise of the patriarchal, nationalistic, homogeneous, political mythology of military istory and the revernce implied thereby; using photographs, not as accurate documentations of history, but rather as a means of obsessively pursuing hyper-personal representation of a Finnish national hero, as porcessed through my lens, that of a woman artist.
The core of the work is made up of a series of framed photographs of landscapes, domestic interiors and still lives. Drawing on traditional photographic modes and intended to situate the viewer in the region that Häyhä inhabited throughout his lifetime (the forests of Karelia), I—a Swedish woman— construct the imagery of the Finnish landscape and still life. I create a version of Häyhä from my own image, placing myself into the work as the would-be sniper/photographer.
The resulting work is not a historical document, but, rather, an abstraction of this historical figure that I—with forceful and uninhibited freedom—have created.
I have sought to reject the premise of the patriarchal, nationalistic, homogeneous, political mythology of military istory and the revernce implied thereby; using photographs, not as accurate documentations of history, but rather as a means of obsessively pursuing hyper-personal representation of a Finnish national hero, as porcessed through my lens, that of a woman artist.
The core of the work is made up of a series of framed photographs of landscapes, domestic interiors and still lives. Drawing on traditional photographic modes and intended to situate the viewer in the region that Häyhä inhabited throughout his lifetime (the forests of Karelia), I—a Swedish woman— construct the imagery of the Finnish landscape and still life. I create a version of Häyhä from my own image, placing myself into the work as the would-be sniper/photographer.
White Death was produced with support from Arts Nova Scotia, Canada Council for the Arts, and IASPIS -the Swedish Arts Grants Committee's International Programme for Visual Artists.