Johannes Heldén – Emergence

We are proud to present Johannes Heldén’s second solo exhibition, Emergence, featuring watercolour collages and a video installation. The new project includes a continuation of the glossary started in Astroecology – Heldén’s praised multidisciplinary project from 2016, featuring a book, video, performance and digital works. 

Heldén is a master of observation, capturing all aspects of experiencing change. His careful depictions of roots and leaves in the series of watercolour collages, or the glossary describing different aspects of nature and life through the words of an unknown author, carefully depicts a world like ours, ruined, or rather, changed into something different. 

Working with themes like ecology, science fiction and sentience, Heldén’s poetry and visual elements explores a world in a near future, very close to our own. With tenderness and a sense of nostalgia, Heldén never loses track of the personal perspective in his works, exploring the bigger picture of climate change, the power of nature to evolve and the somehow comforting feeling that the world will move forward with or without us.

Sentience is a recurring theme in Heldén’s work, infusing his practice in a vivid and relatable sense. The watercolour work Chester’s Lace comes to life with its mutated layers of leaves and sprouts, as does Rain Garden which seems to hold a world of its own. In Heldén’s version of the future, there is comfort in knowing that whatever happens to humanity, the wonder of nature is always present, even in the hardest of realities.

Johannes Heldén (b. 1978 in Stockholm) holds an MFA from Valand Academy of Fine Arts, Gothenburg (1999–2004). He was the IASPIS artist-in-residence at ISCP, New York, in 2018–19, the recipient of the Åke Andrén Art Prize in 2015, and the project Evolution (in collaboration with Håkan Jonson) won the inaugural N. Katherine Hayles prize in 2014. Heldén has exhibited extensively, both in Sweden and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Varbergs Konsthall (2020), Judiska Museet C/O Textilmuseet in Borås (2018), Konstakademien in Stockholm (2018), and Kunsthall Trondheim (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Uppsala Art Museum, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022–23), ARKEN Museum of Modern Art (2021–22), MSU Broad Museum in East Lansing (2021), Malmö Konstmuseum (2020), Bonniers Konsthall (2019), Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale (2019), and the Desert X biennale in Coachella Valley (2019).  

Heldén is represented in the collections of Moderna Museet, Malmö Art Museum, Borås Art Museum, Public Art Agency Sweden, Stockholm konst, Region Västra Götaland and Maria Bonnier Dahlin Foundation. He is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle, among others.