Asa Stjerna (born in 1970 in Stockholm) is a Swedish artist who explores sound and listening via her art. She investigates sound’s potential through site-specific installations, making the embedded circumstances and underlying narratives associated with a situation visible, generating links between past and present, local and global, as well as human and more-than-human. She hopes to redefine hearing in this way, producing a sense of locations as intricate ecologies. She has been examining the present circumstances of sonic located practice and its power to be transformational, i.e. what it means to “make a difference” in the period of Antrophocene and advanced capitalism, as well as working as an artist-researcher. She proposes an understanding of site-specificity as an aesthetic–ethical practice and engagement between specific and diverse “bodies” with agencies—human and non-human, spanning and connecting the material, social, discursive, artistic, and technical realms at the same time in a given situation, guided by feminism, ecosophy, and posthumanism methodologies.
“HOW CAN SOUND, AS ARTISTIC MEDIUM, MEDIATE QUESTIONS OF GLOBAL RELEVANCE?”
I was very interested in this project when I was listening to the presentation and I was really surprised that sound could be associated with the environment. The idea is very bold and new, and I also saw a lot of technology in this project and so on. Projects that combine technology and art always attract a lot of attention. There are also a lot of social issues in this project such as the melting of glaciers due to global warming. I think this is a good thing, because sometimes people don’t pay much attention to professional documentation. But when the artist presents the issue visually through art, it might make people pay more attention to it.
Nast, C., 2021. Venice Biennale invites artist Shilpa Gupta to showcase two installations. [online] Architectural Digest India. Available at: <https://www.architecturaldigest.in/content/venice-biennale-shilpa-gupta-installations/> [Accessed 19 November 2021].