Nanna Lysholt hansen

I am a visual artist exhibiting internationally since 2000 and I am currently collaborating with:

ART BOOKING

nammu_nest

Banja Rathnov Gallery

RSS Press & SixtyEight

In 2021 I founded Nammu Birth where I work as a birth therapist/doula and birth photographer. I am chairholder at The Association of Danish Birth Photographers

You can follow my activities (exhibitions, performances, book launches, workshops) via Instagram nammu_nest Facebook Studio Nanna Lysholt Hansen

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My studio in Copenhagen is open by appointment.

Studio: Vestbanevej 4, backyard, 2500 Valby

Office/Snail Mail: Vestbanevej 20, 4.tv, DK-2500 Valby, Denmark

m: (0045) 60329184

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Do not hesitate to reach out. Subscribe to my newsletter by sending me an email:

nannalysholthansen(a)gmail.com

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RECENT & UPCOMING

_{Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Closing of the Bones, 2025 (Photo:NLH)}

Nanna Lysholt Hansen – Closing of the Bones

Exhibition 25 October – 23 November 2025

FOYER, The Danish Art Workshops, Strandgade 27B, 1401 Copenhagen 

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This message is for my daughters who are now in the process / of writing their own names / and telling me planetary stories / about descending and ascending / and now we are travelling / this is a journey, into the body, through times of crisis / for mother earth

I am  an I / Sometimes I am a she / Sometimes I am a he / Sometimes I am very very I / Sometimes I am we / Sometimes I am my mother

^{(Excerpt from Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Dear Daughter/Sen_sing_InannaInanna (Russ, Shiva, Klein), performance text, Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, Copenhagen, 2019)}

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In video footage, projected onto an installation of eco-printed, plant-dyed cotton textiles, a transformative ceremony unfolds:  Nanna Lysholt Hansen performs a postpartum ritual in collaboration with midwife Marta Orbis and other birth workers.  In addition to the performance video – filmed and edited by film director Anita Mathal Hopland – the work consists of quadraphonic sound, performance text and a performance workshop – Nammu Birth Circle.

The work Closing of the Bones was developed at the Danish Art Workshops through a series of artistic studies with video projection, cotton, oak galls, avocado, madder, tansy and sumac.

The project Dear Daughter (2013-2023) – of which this work is a part – consists of a series of voice-based live performances, video-recorded documents (performance for camera), printed publications (performance texts) and performative installations, in which Nanna Lysholt intertwines her own ongoing memory – thoughts about pregnancy, birth, motherhood and female sexuality – with literary foremothers.

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Birth Worker Workshop / Performance Workshop:

 Myth & Mother Voices: Text and Textile in Care Practice

Workshop collaboration with Nammu Birth & Midwife Marta Orbis

28 October FOYER, The Danish Art Workshops, Strandgade 27B, 1401 Copenhagen 

We will let our individual voices come together in rhapsody by listening and uttering collectively by means of resonance, polyphony, dissonance, ambiguity, plurality, and embrace.

Through a series of exercises with the body, breathing, and use of voice, we will work with:-strengthening presence through listening

-grounding, responsiveness and intuition
-maintaining and centering focus
-vibrations and your personal intuitive sound/voice in a “here and now ”
-transformation of the voice into a language of word-medicine for empowering, healing and caring.

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Friday 8 December: 4-7 PM Opening, performance Kore, standing, 5 PM

Saturday 16 December

4-7 PM Finissage & guest: bastard Press & editor Lise Margrethe Jørgensen

4.30 PM: Script, text, writing and performance: Nanna Lysholt Hansen in conversation with Lise Margrethe Jørgensen editor at bastard Press, and editor of Nanna Lysholt Hansen’s recent publication the camera body & OBSTETRICAL DEPARTMENT / birth / pregnant.

The project Mother Mould part II (Pia Mater/Det bløde materiale is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation and Copenhagen City Council Raadet for Visuel Kunst

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Group show Collega.dk, Tabita Rezaire, Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Olga Ravn, Lea Guldditte, September-December 2023

Exhibition Opening – Doula Workshop – Live Performance – Birth Preparation

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The artist produces a human-sized sculpture of an ancient moon god to watch over all festival-goers. In addition, she will do a performance.

Like an alien serpent, a reproduction of an ancient sculpture will tower above all guests in the foyer of the Gloria stage. It is created by visual artist Nanna Lysholt Hansen

The sculpture is called Ningul and is a Sumerian moon god who gave birth to the belligerent goddess of love Inanna. Through history, stories have told of Inanna whose feminine sides are not only caring and sexy but also hostile.

Together with Nanna Lysholt Hansen’s performance – which is a chanting and enchanting bedtime song for her daughter, full of feminism and care for the environment – the sculpture becomes a common mother for the viewer, the Inannas of the future.

Nanna Lysholt Hansen mixes economics, ecology, diseases and feminism in her practice. In the performance, we also learn how the planet Venus, which is linked to Inanna, has been destroyed by huge amounts of CO2 emissions from its volcanoes. Inanna is our future for better or worse.

(Ida Schyum, Roskilde Festival Curator)

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In 2022 I conduct artistic research with support from the Danish Art Foundation

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Launch: My audio paper “Cyborg Mother Voices and Expanded Notions of Care”, is part of the issue SOUNDING FEMALE WORK: GENDER, TECHNOLOGY AND INFRASTRUCTURE IN NORDIC SOUND ART AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC in Seismograf, January 2022

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Book Launch : My work “Dear Daughter/Anatomy of the Chthulucene” is featured in the book “Maternal Performance: Feminist Relations” co-authored by Lena Simic and Emily Underwood-Lee , Published by Palgrave Macmillan. At the online Launch on Tuesday 15th February I will give a presentation about my performance practice in connection to maternal matters, joined by artists Hannah Ballou (US/UK), Catriona James (UK), Lynn Lu (Singapore/UK), the book authers Lena Simic and Emily Underwood-Lee, and Prof. Elaine Aston, series editor of Contemporary Performance InterActions at Palgrave Macmillan.

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AWARD In December 2021 I have been awarded the Henry Heerup Honory Grant

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Hand of Inanna by Nanna Lysholt Hansen is a performative, filmic, and dialogical artistic engagement. The project seeks to confront the interconnected pandemic, ecological, and economic crises, by utilizing imaginative and utopian strategies as initial points of departure. Lysholt Hansen is particularly interested in exploring the moods, feelings, and needs necessary for the creation of sustainable futures. Through embodying a cyborg mother goddess, the artist invokes sci-fi and speculative fiction motifs combined with vivid references such as the Sumerian poet Enheduanna and NASA recordings of the planet Venus, to meditative gestures and her own vocal presence. By positioning the body and voice as tools of resistance, via eco-feminist questions related to solidarity, care, family, and community, Lysholt Hansen asks – how can we more clearly listen and live together in times of crisis and in the future?

Identifying the need to address topics such as climate change, spirituality, healing, and a broader relationship to ecology, Hansen’s practice employs different forms and formats. The work consists of a vocal workshop, film screening, performance, and public dialogue taking place within the architecture of Aalborg’s Utzon Center. The project will unfold over the course of a two-day choreography within the sweeping, lofty interior as an artistic journey into the underworld and back – to create knowledge sharing, build trust and strength, and inspire new forms of community building.

This project is generously supported by the Danish Arts Foundation. The video work Dear Daughter/Sen_sing_inannainanna (Russ, Shiva, Klein), 2019 is made in collaboration with the artist Stathis Tsemberlidis.

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With presentations by the contributors:

Imayna Caceres
Christina Marie Jespersen
Gry Worre hallberg
Nanna Lysholt Hansen
Lisa Nyberg
And more tba.

The special issue of the Periskop is dedicated to artistic research as an unruly field, between disciplines and becoming. The special issue came into being during a pandemic, as planetary cracks deepen and social injustices, structural and systemic discriminations, inequalities, climate disasters, displacements, and wars continue to unsettle our present. This special issue asks: How can we reclaim artistic research? And how are artistic research practices engaging in the co-creation of other worlds in response to different forms of social crises and planetary destruction?The special issue is compiled of various voices, practices, and propositions that each draws different trajectories and avenues for artistic research as a field that is in a continuous process of becoming, with contributions by Julie Edel Hardenberg, Imayna Caceres, Lisa Nyberg, Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Christian Danielewitz, Maria Finn, Christina Marie Jespersen, Sofie Volquartz Lebech, Mia Line, Gry Worre Hallberg, Helen Eriksen, Gry Ulrichsen & Zahra Bayati.The special issue journal is edited by Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Camilla Graff Junior, Lise Margrethe Jørgensen & Charlotte Hauch.Art work by Julie Edel Hardenberg

For more info about the journal: https://tidsskrift.dk/periskop/issue/view/8920
The printed journal issue can be purchased during the launch for 75 kr

Group Show Anatomy of the Chthulucene / The Chthonic Ones
part of Overgange // Transitions
10 May – 29 September 2019 , The Women’s Museum, Aarhus, DK

Live performance Dear Daughter/Anatomy of the Chthulucene #10
11 September 2019, 17.30-18.00
The Women’s Museum, Aarhus, DK

Group Show Dear Daughter/Sen_sing_inannainanna #2 and Dear Daughter/Anatomy of the Chthulucene #7 and  part of Copenhagen Creatives 4-17.09.2019 Gallerie Tanit, Beirut, Libanon

Group Show Mund part of GIFC/Velvet Ropes
16 — 18 August 2019
Galleri Golsa, Oslo, Norway

 Live Performance Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Sen_sing_inannainanna
6 hours live performance, bus  9A between Refshaleøen & Glyptoteket
Saturday 25 May 2019, 11 am -2 pm & 3-6 pm
in collaboration with Copenhagen Contemporary, Art Week Copenhagen, Glyptotekek

Screening Nanna Lysholt Hansen, Temporary Sculptures for Beijing Apartments, 2009-2010, (6x)45-60 min. digital video with sound
Copenhagen Contemporary  –  Art Week Copenhagen Opening Event
Thursday 23 May 2019, 5 pm – midnight

Group Show Dura Mater #402 part of Solidaritetssalon TALETID
6 April – 23 Juni 2019 Rønnebæksholm, DK

Screening “Dear Daughter/Organic Cyborg Stories” part of Balancing Actions: video screening curated by Myrel S. Chernick & Niku Kashef @ 107th CCA Annual Conference, NYC, 13-16 February 2019

Seminar Kunsthal Charlottenborg Art Talks: It Matters What Thoughts Think Thoughts  6.12.2018, 5-7 PM  Kunsthal Charlottenborg

Live Performance Nanna Lysholt Hansen -Dear Daughter/Anatomy of the Chthulucene #8
15.11.2018 @5.30 pm + 8.30 pm
SMK  – The national gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen  
SMK Fridays

Solo show Nanna Lysholt Hansen – Dura Mater
2-24.11 2018
M100, Odense, www.m100.dk
supported by Beckett-fonden and The Danish Arts Foundation

Group show REAL ESTATE
12.10 – 18.11. 2018
Huset for Kunst & Design, Holstebro, www.hfkd.dk

Live performance Tribune
12.10. 2018
Huset for Kunst & Design, Holstebro, www.hfkd.dk

Live performance  Dear Daughter/Anatomy of the Chthulucene #7
19.9.2018
Poesiens Hus, København, www.goldendays.dk

Group show Copenhagen Creatives
7.9-7.10. 2018
Maison du Danemark, Paris, www.copenhagencreatives.com
supported by The Danish Arts Foundation

Group show New Tactics – moving in a soft field
29.08 – 28.10 2018
Galleri Image, Aarhus, www.galleriimage.dk
supported by Kulturudviklingspuljen Aarhus

with support from the Danish Arts Foundation