Åsa Helena Stjerna (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 spatial situation perceivable. Through perceptually and transdisciplinary driven approaches, her works create connections between the past and the present, the local and the global, and the human and the 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 ecosophy, immanence philosophy and posthumanism she explores 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.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, (Projet title: Sonic Visions of the Arctic. Duration: 2021-2023. Funded by: The Swedish Research Council). As part of this project, she is visiting researcher at the research group Worldling Northen Art:WONA, Arctic University of Tromsø, Norway.