Helena Petersen works predominantly with the medium of photography. She develops performative, camera-less methods in which materiality, time and chance influence the image process. The focus of her work lies in natural phenomena and materials, in which the occurrences and transformation processes are inscribed. These she explores through use of experimental photographic processes and makes visible those fleeting changesthat elude immediate perception. This gives rise to series of images that straddle the line between documentary observation and abstraction. In the publication A History of Abstraction in Photography, she is described as one of the defining positions of the "Analog Turn".

Helena Petersen (*1987 in Munich) lives and works in Munich. She studied Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the Berlin University of the Arts. She completed her studies under Professor Leiko Ikemura in 2013 as a master student and was awarded the University of the Arts’ Master’s Student Prize. Her work has been exhibited, among other places, at “Return to Earth” at Bob’s Galleria in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2025), and at Foto Arsenal as part of the Vienna Climate Biennale (2024), Klein Collection (2023), the DZ BANK Art Foundation (2023), the Grassi Museum (2021), C/O Berlin (2018), the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation (2018), and the Fotomuseum Winterthur (2017). She was an artist-in-residence at Belvedere 21 in Vienna and at Artward in Brussels. Most recently, she was nominated for the Klein Collection Photography Art Foundation Prize (2023) and the Prix Pictet (2021).