Hannah Heilmann: Seller's Remorse

In Seller's Remorse, Hannah Heilmann presents a testament to the role of emotions in consumer behavior. By turning the term buyers remorse on its head, she situates herself as a producer within the consumer wheel, but also asks about remorse in the production industries. Through new works, including drawings of dressed-up stick-figures and ghostly clothes in erie landscapes, mannequins and sculptures of cardboard, and an idiosyncratic webshop, Heilmann invites you into her artistic engine room where complex and poetic narratives about consumerism intertwine. 

 

It is a complicated story bound in economy and objects, but also in desire, nostalgia, identity-building, and addiction. It goes beyond time and reason, as contemporary fast fashion mimics the 1800s with romantic notions, when in fact the people of the industrial revolution were on a fast track dreaming of a better future. Heilmann maps out such narratives by tracing artifacts, clothes, and historic machinery and placing her findings within uneasy dream worlds side by side with contemporary trends and shop-like architecture. Passive stick-figures dressed to impress are drifting as ghosts without direction. Mannequins perform as prop-shop assistants, selling decorative mixed-media works, standing next to a box of wooden arms and torn pieces of cardboard. It is two sides of the consumer-coin, capturing individuality between creation and aesthetics and decay and remorse.