Åsa Helena Stjerna

Curriculum Vitae

(born 1970 in Stockholm) is a Swedish artist using sound and listening as her artistic modes of exploration. Through her site-specific installations, she explores sound’s potential, making the embedded conditions and underlying narratives connected to a situation perceivable, drawing connections between past and present, local and global, as well as human and more-than human. By this she seeks to reframe the act of listening, evoking a sensibility of places as complex ecologies.

Also active as artistic researcher, she has been specifically interested in exploring the contemporary conditions of sonic situated practice and its ability of being transformative, i.e. what it actually means “to make a difference” in the era of Antrophocene and advanced capitalism. Guided by methodologies of  feminism, ecosophy and posthumanism she proposes an understanding of site-specificity as an aesthetic–ethical practice  and engagement between specific and diverse “bodies” with agencies—human as well as non-human, spanning across and connecting the material, social, discursive, artistic, and technical realms at the same time in a given situation. 

Stjerna has participated in an extensive number of exhibitions internationally, among other Klangstaetten Stadtklänge Braunschweig,  the Transmediale Media Festival, Berlin; the Nordic Music Days, Stockholm; the Ultima Contemporary Music festival, Oslo and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her works include several public permanents commissions: Earth Song (2020), commissioned by Stockholm Konst; Sky Brought Down (2017) Sahlgrenska university hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden commissioned by Västra Götalandsregionens konstenhet and The Well (2014) at Swedish Institute in Paris commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden.

Stjerna represents professorship sound art at Hochschule für bildende Künste in Braunschweig, Germany, 2020-2021.

Selected Publications

• See a full list of publication and works at www.asastjerna.se