Født, bor og arbejder i Danmark.
Uddannet ved Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi, 2006.
Ehlers’ praksis foregår eksperimentelt på tværs af fotografi, video, installation, skulptur og performance. I en årrække har hun skabt værker, der går tæt på betragtninger om etnicitet og identitet inspireret af sin egen dansk/caribiske baggrund.
Igennem sit arbejde opbygger Ehlers universer, hvor store spørgsmål og svære problematikker som eksempelvis Danmarks rolle som slavenation bliver bearbejdet – en del af den danske kulturarv, som tit bliver overset i den almindelige historieskrivning.
Den 31. marts 2018 afslørede hun ‘I Am Queen Mary’ – et offentligt skulpturprojekt i samarbejde med den caribiske kunster, La Vaughn Belle. Skulpturen er placeret foran Vestindisk Pakhus / Den Kgl. Afstøbningssamling.
–
Jeannette Ehlers is a Copenhagen-based artist of Danish and Trinidadian descent whose practice takes shape experimentally across photography, video, installation, sculpture and performance. She graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2006.
Ehlers’ work often brings about decolonial hauntings and disruptions and she insists on the possibility for empowerment and healing in her art, honoring legacies of resistance in the African diaspora. She merges the historical, the collective and the rebellious with the familial, the bodily and the poetic.
In the words of author Lesley-Ann Brown, “Ehlers reminds all who participate in or gaze at her work that history is not in the past.”
She has exhibited internationally and was shortlisted to create a national monument to The Windrush Generation at London Waterloo Station 2022 as well as a decolonial monument in Braunschweig Germany 2022/2023.
She is the co-creator of the public sculpture project I Am Queen Mary, 2018
