Ola Ståhl

The hidden, artistic research project (Ola Ståhl, Petra Lilja and Anthony Wagner)

With a profoundly hybrid background at the intersection between critical, theoretical and artistic research and practice, Ola Ståhl holds a PhD and an MA with Distinction from the Department of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and a BA with First Class Honours in the History of Art, Design and Film with a minor degree in Creative Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. He has exhibited and performed internationally since the late 1990s and published several chapbooks and artist’s books alongside articles, essays and prose texts in various journals, collections and anthologies.

For three years, starting in 2001, he was part of the editorial collective of the international Cultural Studies journal Parallax and between 2001 and 2008 he served as the main instigator behind and coordinator of the UK-based artist collective C.CRED [Collective CREative Dissent]. Following the cessation of the activities of C.CRED, he initiated and coordinated the activities of the alternative, experimental publishing platform Publication Studio Malmö (2009-2016), focusing on what might be described as the social and cultural, and fundamentally collaborative, nature of writing, in an expanded sense, and more generally, publishing, with a particular focus on artists' books.

Between 2003 and 2008 he worked as Associate Lecturer on the Fine Art programme at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design and the Design Cultures programme at London College of Communication, both colleges within the University of the Arts, London, and the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2013, he took up a position as Senior Lecturer in Design at Linnaeus University, where he helped develop the department's + Change vision and focus on sustainability, obtaining a full professorship in 2024.  At Linnaeus University, he is also a member Linnaeus University Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), coordinating the activities of the cluster IMS Green: Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency with Jørgen Bruhn. Within the framework of this research cluster, he has conjointly been coordinating the development, design and implementation of educations in Climate Emergency Studies on both under- and postgraduate level.

Please visit www.olastahl.com for further information.

Concrete, & The Smear, Ola Ståhl, artistic research project / audio-visual installation, Esbjerg Art Museum (2007) and NEON Gallery (2009)

Teaching

Ola Ståhl is primarily teaching on the Master programmes in Design + Change and Innovation through Business, Engineering and Design, and on under- and postgraduate courses in Climate Emergency Studies. Occasionally, he has also appeared in other supervision and teaching contexts within and outside the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. He has also supervised numerous thesis- and degree projects on both under- and postgraduate level. Currently, his main teaching obligations are related to transdisciplinary and transversal approaches to and artistic mediations of the planetary climate and ecological emergency, particularly in relation to notions of agency and transformation.

Research

Ola Ståhl’s main field of (most often collaborative) research primarily lies in the following (interconnected) fields:

• inter- and transmedial, transdisciplinary artistic research and practice;
• the (artistic and other) mediation of climate and ecological emergency particularly in relation to sociopolitical agency, ethico-aesthetics and transversal approaches and perspectives;
• creative-critical and art writing practices, experimental publishing and critical event- and dialogue-based work.

Commissions

At Linnaeus University, apart from being Professor at the Department of Design, Ola Ståhl is project coordinator of IMS Green: Mediations of Climate and Ecological Emergency as well as under- and postgraduate courses in Climate Emergency Studies offered by the Department of Film and Literature, both in collaboration with Jørgen Bruhn. He is also involved in the artist in residence programme HULT, a collaboration between Linnaeus University (IMS), Region Kronoberg, and other local actors, and an environmental humanities cluster offering summer and autumn schools, among other things, within the framework of the European University for Well-Being (EUniWell). When not present at Linnaeus University, he works from and serves as the chairperson and one of the coordinators of the studio collective and cultural space Y13 at Dalaplan in Malmö.