Mads Holm
HRTLND

Disko Bay is thrilled to present HRTLND (Heartland) by Danish photographer Mads Holm, a powerful exploration of life in a rapidly changing world, captured across 20 European and North American countries between 2013 and 2023. Through striking images of urban life, demonstrations, emerging technologies, migration, architecture, and militarized spaces, the book reflects on the paradoxes and tensions shaping modern society. It highlights the interplay between connectivity and control, freedom and surveillance, and the gradual militarization of everyday life.

The book presents a hyperreal landscape where the ordinary is interwoven with the unsettling, challenging the viewer to question what is visible and what remains obscured. Here Holm captures the undercurrents of global capitalism, militarization, and societal fragmentation, offering a layered narrative that is as much an artistic statement as it is a political act.

Featuring a foreword by acclaimed photographer Donald Weber and five reflective texts by Holm, HRTLND is a profound visual chronicle of our collective condition, offering a stark portrait of the times as of now. The object is a lay-flat softcover wrapped in a French poster jacket with a UTM world map printed on the back. The UTM map are the most used coordinate system in the context of military mission planning. In HRTLND it is highlighting the precise position of each image.

The forces that alter our world today fuse and blend with everyday life and thus become very hard to see. It seeps into everything around and inside of us. It looks like we are being helped to stay safe from all the threats and dangers out there among us. The narrative is that the enemy can be anyone and everywhere and the more we fear that enemy the more there is to secure and thus the more to control. It is smart. The permanent state of emergency is an inexhaustible resource. – From the text Excess of Reality, HRTLND

Mads Holm (b. 1990, Copenhagen) is a Danish photographer and writer whose work explores themes of surveillance, power, and contemporary society. He holds an MA in Photography & Society from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague and a BA in Fine Art Photography from Glasgow School of Art. He also studied at ICP in New York and attended Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography. Holm’s work has been exhibited widely across Denmark, the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. His work has been recognized with several awards and nominations and he has been shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award, Kassel Dummy Award, and Fiebre Dummy Award.

• Softcover with gauze spine and poster jacket
• 21,5 × 31 cm
• 184 pages
• 81 color plates
• Five reflective texts by Mads Holm
• Foreword by Donald Weber
• Text in English
• Edition of 800
• Printed at Narayana Press
• ISBN 97887-975274-3-6
• Published 10 April 2025

Press:
Video of conversation with Mads Holm and Donald Weber
Art Matter
Kulturkapellet