Jana Johanna Haeckel is a Brussels-based curator, researcher, and lecturer specialising in photography and contemporary image cultures. She is the artistic director and curator of düsseldorf photo+ Biennial for Photography 2027.
Her work explores the politics of images and bodies in contemporary art, with a particular focus on the shifting ethics of photography in the digital age. Through exhibitions, publications, and research projects, she investigates artistic practices that challenge dominant historical, colonial, and institutional narratives, often through critical engagements with archives and forms of visual memory.
Jana has curated numerous exhibitions and research projects in the field of photography at institutions including the Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Photoforum Pasquart (Biel/Bienne),
the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung (Munich), Centre del Carme (Valencia), Kunstraum Niederösterreich (Vienna), and the Drdova Gallery (Prague), among others.
She holds a PhD in Art History and currently teaches the history and theory of photography, contemporary image practices, and exhibition-making to BA, MA, and PhD students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK & Conservatorium). There, she also supervises the research cluster Archival Sensations, which investigates artistic approaches to archives, memory, and embodied forms of knowledge.
Current | Recent
Talk
"Cocktail Prolongé: F.C. Gundlach Special" – Panel Talk as part of the Photography Triennale Hamburg,
5.6.2026, Deichtorhallen Hamburg
Essays | Articles
Between Staging and Documentation: Body, Affect, and Ambiguity in the F.C. Gundlach Collection, Catalogue Essay in: Cocktail Prolongé: F.C. Gundlach Special, Kehrer Publishing, 2026.
"Do-Li-Na. At the margins of visibility", Essay on the work of Davide Degano, CAMERA AUSTRIA, 173/2026.
Bilderuniversum No 8. Interview mit Jana Johanna Haeckel : Über die Verknüpfung von Care-Diskurs und Fotografie, kollaboratives Arbeiten und "caring structures" im Kulturbetrieb.
Publications
Love, Maybe – Intimacy and Desire in Contemporary Art, Exhibition Catalogue, Distanz 2025.
Everything Passes Except the Past. Decolonizing Ethnographic Museums, Film Archives and Public Space, Sternberg Press 2021.
Contact: jana.haeckel@gmail.com