HEIRLOOM is an art center dedicated to questions regarding archives. We reactivate art practices and collections, bringing them into dialogue with the present.

An heirloom is an object that travels through time and generations, imbued with ever-changing meaning, its value never clear-cut. This ongoing negotiation of meaning and value reflects HEIRLOOM’s approach to opening up archives.

HEIRLOOM seeks to broaden the diversity of the stories collected and encourage a more critical engagement with the material embedded in cultural heritage. Our ambition is to shed light on previously unseen connections and offer new perspectives on and contexts for the stories told.

HEIRLOOM was founded and is run by curators and art historians Stine Hebert and Johanne Løgstrup in response to the urgent need to document and make available the many histories of art.

Heirloom offers a variety of possibilities to study and learn more about art, archives and legacies. We offer guided tours and educational courses in connection with the exhibitions. Please contact us for more detailed information. 

Heirloom works strategically to offer advice and guidance for artists and institutions in collaboration with other specialists.  

HEIRLOOM offers the course I'm an Archive in collaboration with the Visual Artists' Association (BKF). The course offers a number of perspectives on how visual artists can engage with their own artistic archive. The goal of this program is to deepen artists' understanding of their collective body of work, addressing key issues stretching from copyright and legal considerations to conservation practices and creative approaches.

The title, I’m an Archive, is inspired by the British artist Barbara Stevini (1928–2020), who in her later years revisited some of the pivotal points in her politically and socially engaged art practice. The title serves as both a tribute to the artist’s legacy and a poignant, somewhat cynical reminder: Visual artists often constitute the most comprehensive archives of their own work, possessing invaluable knowledge not held by museums, galleries, or other institutions.

HEIRLOOM is dedicated to exhibiting and initiating projects that focus on the artist’s archive. It is the ambition of the centre to revisit and contextualise artistic practices through new curatorial concepts and formats.

Some exhibits are carried out in close collaboration with research institutions and -projects. This includes, among others, the programme I’m an Archive (2023), to which the visual artist Yvette Brachman contributed with her installation Moe Mir, created during her Mads Øvlisen’s Novo Nordisk practice-based post-doc, in collaboration with the National Museum of Art (Statens Museum for Kunst). The exhibition Heart on the Tongue (2024) with Mia Edelgart and Eva la Cour was produced in collaboration with Art as Forum and PASS – Center for Practice-Based Art Reasearch at the University of Copenhagen. The exhibit Tracer Object (2025) by the visual artist Anne Haaning will happen in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London and the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. 

HEIRLOOM has also formalised its collaboration with the research centre PASS Center for Practice-based Art Research at the University of Copenhagen through the appointment of co-director Stine Hebert as associate professor. Practice-based curatorial research into questions related to archives, artistic legacies and institutional formats will be part of the collaboration with the research centre.

HEIRLOOM’s first archiving project is the archive Let Us Speak Now by the visual artist Kirsten Dufour Andersen. Let Us Speak Now is a video archive about feminism, activism and the production of art, based on interviews with Danish and international artists and feminists. The archive contains interviews and conversations with important actors in the early feminist movement of the 1970ies, along with a younger generation of artists and activists with an intersectional feminist approach.

Let Us Speak Now is part of the Ny Carlsberg Foundation’s digital archive Sources of Danish Art History. The archiving is done by visual artist Pia Rönicke.

Part of the archive will feature in an exhibition in the spring of 2026, curated by Pia Rönicke and co-director of HEIRLOOM, Johanne Løgstrup.

Co-directors
Stine Hebert
Johanne Løgstrup

Head of Operations
Karen Mette Fog Pedersen

Art technician
Christopher McSherry

Graphic design
Rosen Eveleigh

Web development
Julia Novitch
Alejandro Ample

Copy editing & translation
Jennifer Russell

Council of Visual Arts, Copenhagen Municipality

The Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansen's Foundation

The Augustinus Foundation

The Beckett Foundation

The Bikuben Foundation

The BKF's Copyright Fund

The Danish Arts Foundation

The F.L. Foght's Foundation

The Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansen's Foundation

The Knud Højgaard Foundation

The Mads Øvlisen Novo Nordisk Foundation

The Obel Family Foundation

The 15 June Foundation

New Carlsberg Foundation

OCA

Sculptor Professor Gottfred Eickhoff and Wife Painter Gerda Eickhoff’s Foundation