(H)Anne-Mette Ohlsen

Change the World: (H)Anne-Mette Ohlsen and the Department of Photography at HFBK between 1952 and 1969

What about photography? That was my first thought after scrolling through the current list of alumni on this website and not finding a single person filed under “Photography.” So perhaps the photography department isn’t such an old department at the HFBK. A fellow student suggested that perhaps photography wasn’t considered art, but rather a craft, and might have been part of the graphic design department. ¹

I myself was a Master’s student at HFBK in the Department of Photography and graduated in summer 2025, and was therefore naturally curious about the lack of representation in this department. As I looked further into this with the help of Nicholas Mboya, we did discover some names among the alumni from between 1945 and 1985, but not many: twelve out of a list containing almost 630 names. The first thing that struck me was that the majority of the photography students were Middle Eastern, from Persia/Iran or Turkey, with the exception of two Dutch, a single Italian, and a single Danish one.

Looking at their professors, one name kept recurring: Eberhard Troeger. I google his name and find two beautiful black and white photographs of two strange birds carved beautifully from wood.² They look angry and chic at the same time. The photos are installation shots of the German contribution to the X Triennale di Milano in Italy, which took place in 1954. The photographs are from the same year. At that time, Troeger had just started working as a photography professor at HFBK which he did from 1953 – 1964). Did he take his students with him on a trip to Italy as our professors do today? Were the students standing behind him as he pressed the shutter?

I decide to go through the list methodically: from the top on, I carefully cross-reference every name on Google, type in their birthdays, and rearrange names searching for alternative modes of spelling. I highlight their names with either green, yellow, or red marker according to my results. Green means I have, in one way or another, found them in my online search. Yellow means I have found a close match but can’t be too sure. Red means nothing.

In my comments for the second name on the list, Reza Gharib Garakani, I have scribbled a bleak note: “Found his gravestone. Buried in California,” followed by a link to a picture of the gravestone on a website called “findagrave-dot-com.” The birth year matches the year stated in our archive. He was born in 1933 in Tehran. According to the page, he only turned 50 or 51. He was a student of Troeger’s, as well.

Disgruntled, I continue down my list, only to discover that almost everyone is—more or less—undiscoverable, or at least, ungoogleable. Only one name is eventually highlighted in green: Hanne-Mette Ohlsen. The only woman on the list, and coincidentally, she happens to be Danish, like me. I do a quick Google search and find her name on a poster for an exhibition at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf from 1970.³ The exhibition was titled Poesie muß von allen gemacht werden! Verändert die Welt! (“Poetry must be made by all! Change the world!”). What a wonderful title, I think, as an avid reader and writer of poetry myself.

(H)Anne-Mette Ohlsen

In the archive, her name is spelled wrong, with an added H in the beginning. It’s Anne. But the name she has used throughout her career seems to be simply Mette Ohlsen.

I quickly find both an email address and a Facebook profile that matches her. The same day, I write her an email:

“May 11th 2025, 8:22 PM

Dear Mette Ohlsen,

My name is Matilde, and I am writing to you because I came across your name during my studies at HFBK Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.

As part of my studies, I am following a seminar called The International Alumni Archive (TIAA) led by Professor Astrid Mania. The project aims to map former international students who have attended the school over time, and to create an online archive based on our research.

I am studying a master's degree in photography at the school, and became interested in the school's photography department and alumni. I therefore asked for a list of names, and I received a list of 12 names - you were the only woman on the list, and coincidentally, Danish, like myself. That naturally piqued my interest.

I have done a little research on you, and am very interested in hearing more about your life and work. The collage work Søger/Suche (“Seeking”) about the Greenlandic children displaced to Denmark has piqued my interest in particular. If you are interested in participating in a short interview, I would be happy to send you some questions.

You can see more about TIAA on the project's website (which is not yet fully completed): https://tiaa.hfbk.net/

I have also written to you on Facebook, as I do not know which channel works best to reach you.

Many greetings from Hamburg,

Matilde”

Less than an hour later, she replies. She is offering to answer my questions, even inviting me to her place for an interview. I should hurry, she writes, as she was in the midst of throwing out and burning.⁴

I immediately write back, but despite several attempts, I never hear from Mette Ohlsen again, and I am left wondering what she meant by “throwing out and burning.” Did she burn her artworks? The stunning collage work about the Greenlandic children called “Søger/Suche” (“Searching”)? ⁵ And why did she suddenly stop responding?

“Søger/Suche” is an artwork made up of 110 small pictures in a large collage, juxtaposing photos of Greenlandic children with administrative government documents. The documents detail how in 1951, the Danish Government deported 22 Greenlandic children to Denmark to live without their families as an experiment. The purpose was to “Danify” the children, so that they could return—in the words of the Danish government—”as a Danish-speaking elite and cultural pioneers in the modernization of Greenland.” ⁶ Some of the children never returned to Greenland, while others returned, only to live in an orphanage, many experiencing tragic fates. Mette Ohlsen’s work won the Meldorfer Culture Prize in 2011.⁷ The official apology from Denmark to the Greenlandic children came in 2022.⁸

I decide to keep researching her and her work and hope to establish contact at a later time.

Mette Ohlsen was born on the 17th of November in 1944 during the Second World War in Denmark when it was occupied by Nazi Germany. She studied at HFBK from 1963 to 1969 under several professors (Paul Wunderlich, Richard von Sichowsky, Kilian Breiner, Hans Michel) and in several departments (Graphic design, Typography, Photography).

She lives and works in the southern part of Denmark on the island Als, not far from Germany. Her work spans a variety of media, from bigger collage installations to books, prints, and other predominantly paper-based works. She has exhibited in places such as Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1970), Kunstverein Kehdingen (1997), Kunsthaus Hamburg (1995, 1994, 1998), and Overgaden in Copenhagen (1988). She has illustrated and published several books. One, I find on a Danish auction website, it is titled “Song to Maria’s children – A Hundred times Maria and 2751 Fallen Soldiers of the First World War.” It’s a book of poetry and etchings created for an exhibition with the same name.

Without knowing her, and with very limited access to her artistic work, I formulate for myself a sense that her artistship revolves around lost and displaced souls, about the human condition.

On another auction site, I find four original lithographs of hers. There are no pictures on the website, and Mette Ohlsen’s work—work that may or may not still exist, that may or may not currently be burning in a “drastic and dramatic” bonfire—remains mysteriously hidden from me.

More than anything, I am left with a feeling of unfinished business—a wish that I could somehow immortalize her art, or at least her reflections about a life filled with art, before it’s too late. And so, I decide to write her one last email with an offer to call her for a talk on the phone instead. Why else would she have responded to my initial email so swiftly, if not because she had something to share?