Axel Andersson (Ph.D. European University Institute, 2007) teaches Art History in the Text Area at the Royal Institute of Art. He is responsible for years one and two.
Axel Andersson work engages with questions related to Historiography, Colonialism, and the concept of Nature. His research investigates European post-war Exoticism, the transmission of the techniques of the body across colonial fault lines and the Pre-History of Romanticism. In later years he has engaged himself with the aesthetics and philosophy of deep time in a worked centered on nuclear waste. He is the author of five monographies: Den koloniala simskolan (Glänta, 2016), Atlantvärlden (Glänta, 2018), Absolut farmakon. Kärnavfall och evighet som tanke och konst (Ariel, 2019), Negative Geology: A Cultural and Cultural History of Early European Mountaineering (OEI, 2021) as well as the book Framtidens kritik written together with Alexander Svedberg (Ariel, 2018). He has also contributed to a number of anthologies on Art, Colonialism and criticism. In addition, he has been active as an essayist and critic in a number of Swedish and international publications and projects.
Between 2016 and 2021 Axel Andersson was the publisher of Kritiklabbet, a critic-led imitative to investigate the aesthetic, technical and economic conditions of criticism in the new digital public sphere.
Axel Andersson is currently working with a project on art and surplus.