Åsa Stjerna

About Åsa Stjerna

I am an artist and artistic researcher with a background in photography. Since the early 2000s, my practice has expanded from photography and lens-based work towards site-specific and sound-based forms. My practice ranges from interventions in public space to projects developed in close dialogue with natural science and marine research. The spatial, temporal and embodied capacities of the sonic are central to my work, allowing me to approach relations, processes and scales that lie beyond, or at the edge of, direct perception and make them audible and sensorially accessible.

A recurring strand of my practice has developed through a long-standing engagement with the ocean and through dialogue and collaboration with marine research. Through sound, sonification, photography, and audiovisual and spatial practice, I explore how scientific data and observations can be artistically activated and shifted from measurements, maps and models into sensory experiences. I have worked with data from the North Atlantic Current, the underwater soundscape of the Baltic Sea, seismic activity and bathymetric measurements of the Arctic seabed. This work has also deepened my critical engagement with the measurement practices, technologies and infrastructures through which environments are observed, mapped and made available as knowledge. I explore what these technologies make possible to perceive and know, and how selection, uncertainty, technical limitations, as well as historical, cultural and geopolitical conditions, shape the knowledge that is produced. A key point of departure in my work is that data and measurement technologies are situated and themselves participate in shaping knowledge about an environment.

Central to my artistic research is art’s capacity to intervene in and renegotiate these processes. Through artistic engagement with data, technologies, materials and space, I explore how established representations can be displaced, how excluded or marginalised aspects can be reactivated, and how other perceptual, spatial and epistemic relations can become possible. In my doctoral research and dissertation Before Sound: Transversal Processes in Site-Specific Sonic Practice (2018), I developed, from my experience of site-specific sonic practice, a transversal approach to artistic production. For me, transversality means tracing how bodies, materials, technologies, social and cultural contexts and ecological processes collectively shape a situation, and exploring how artistic practice can activate and create new relations between them.

I further developed this perspective in the Swedish Research Council-funded postdoctoral research project Sonic Visions of the Arctic (2020–2023), where I examined how sonar, hydrophones and other acoustic measurement technologies participate in the production of knowledge and imaginaries of the Arctic. My ongoing practice continues this long-standing work with marine environments and technologies, with a focus on the critical and artistic exploration of marine sensing technologies and scientific infrastructures. With support from Kulturbryggan, I am exploring the marine laboratory as an artistic and knowledge-producing environment, where environmental data, sensing technologies, ecological processes and artistic methods can be brought into new relations.

In autumn 2026, I teach Sensing Ocean – Art, Critical Practice, and Marine Technologies at HDK-Valand. The course brings artistic practice into dialogue with marine research, sensing technologies and environmental data, and explores the questions and possibilities that emerge when artistic practices enter these contexts.

Within the MFA Programme in Photography, I aim to strengthen transdisciplinary approaches by creating productive connections between photographic practice, artistic research, technology and other fields of knowledge.

You are warmly welcome to contact me about art, research, teaching, possible collaborations – or simply for a coffee and a conversation!