Jana Johanna Haeckel
Jana Johanna Haeckel is a Brussels-based curator, researcher, and lecturer specialising in photography and contemporary image practices. She is the artistic director of düsseldorf photo+ Biennial for Photography 2027. Her work examines image and body politics in contemporary art, with a focus on the evolving ethics of photography in the digital age. Through her exhibitions and research, she highlights artistic practices that challenge historical and colonial narratives, often through innovative approaches to archival material.
Jana holds a PhD in art history and currently teaches BA, MA, and PhD students in the history and theory of photography and exhibition making at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent (KASK). There, she supervises the research cluster Archival Sensations.
Previously, she directed Photoforum Pasquart in Switzerland, where she has curated solo and group exhibitions with artists including Akosua Viktoria Adu-Sanyah, Bianca Baldi, Sheida Soleimani, Karla Hiraldo Voleau, and Salvatore Vitale. International selected exhibition projects include Love, Maybe – Intimacy and Desire in Contemporary Art (Alexander Tutskek-Stiftung, Munich, 2025), Resistant Faces (Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2021), Everything Passes Except the Past (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2020), and the nomadic art programme Perruche (Goethe-Institut, Brussels, 2018–2021).
Current | Recent
Exhibition
Laura Palau: Mal hora, bon hora, Centre Del Carme, Valencia, 21.11.2025 - 18.1.2026
Interview | Articles
"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