Lecture by Jonas Staal, followed by a dialogue with critic and scholar Kim West.
Date: Wednesday December 10th 2025
Time: 18:00
Venue: Statens konstråd, Skeppsholmen, Svensksundsvägen 11A
Register via this link
Shadow Art World: An Introduction
Parallel to the official art world exists the shadow art world: artists, designers, filmmakers, architects, (science fiction) writers and game designers employed by the military industrial complex as well as ultranationalist and fascist regimes. These cultural workers are hardly ever discussed in the official art world, but they tend to be extremely powerful.
You might not have seen the films by Trump ideologue Steve Bannon that circulate in the shadow art world, but today you woke up in a world made by Steve Bannon. Similarly, you might not know of the team of cultural workers assembled in the “Red Team” employed by the French Ministry of Defence to create speculative scenarios of future conflict, but present military conflicts were first imagined by them before they were turned into reality.
This talk further explores the role of the shadow art world in Sweden, for example in the form of the quadrennial immersive military theatre staged by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, known as “SAMÖ,” focused on participatory scripts narrating terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and nuclear warfare. Who are the cultural workers involved in these mass performances, and in what way have they contributed to turning extreme militarization into a new normal?
Artist and propaganda researcher Jonas Staal based on his current research at the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, will attempt to act as a guide into the shadow art world and address some urgent questions. Have we arrived at a point where the shadow art world is becoming the official art world, as a fascist cultural turn is emerging everywhere? And what does the shadow art world tell us about the imaginative power of art and cultural work, as a catalyst to construct entirely new physical realities? And how do we reclaim the imaginative power and potential of art to propagate an emancipatory politics of reparation, solidarity and regeneration?
Jonas Staal
Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), with writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021-ongoing), and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union (2019-ongoing).
Exhibition-projects include We Demand a Million More Years (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2022), Extinction Wars (with Radha D’Souza, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2023), Propaganda Station (Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2024) and The British East India Company on Trial (with Radha D’Souza, Serpentine Galleries, 2025). His projects have been exhibited widely at venues such as the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, V&A in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, M_HKA in Antwerp, Centre Pompidou-Metzand the Nam June Paik Art Center in Seoul, as well as the 7th Berlin Biennale, the 31st São Paulo Biennale, the 12th Taipei Biennale and the 14th Shanghai Biennale.
Publications include Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019) and Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (The MIT Press, 2024). Staal completed his PhD research on propaganda art at the PhDArts program of Leiden University, the Netherlands.
Kim West
Kim West is a critic, researcher, and editor based in Stockholm. His research focuses on the contemporary development of critical aesthetic thought, the cultural history of popular avant-gardes, and the institutional and technical transformations of art’s forms of mediation. He is currently a lecturer at REMESO, the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity, and Society at Linköping University, Sweden. He previously directed the research project “Autonomy, Culture, Action: On Culture’s Spheres of Political Action in the Neoliberal Welfare State” at Södertörn University, Stockholm. 2017–19 he was a Guest Professor in Art Theory at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. He is an initiator and convenor of the independent Institute for Advanced Studies in Political Aesthetics in Stockholm, and a founding editor of 1|21 Press. Recent and forthcoming publications include The Autonomy of Art is Ordinary (Sternberg, 2024) and Teori om det folkliga avantgardet (Theory of the Popular Avant-Garde, Glänta Produktion, 2025).
CAPIm
The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary is committed to interdisciplinary practice and research in the meeting between contemporary art and the future of politics. Based at two institutions of higher education in art: HDK-Valand and Kungl. Konsthögskolan, the Centre’s aim is to facilitate connections between research and education through an engagement with experimental approaches. It is the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in the field of Artistic Research.
The activities of the Centre are organised around four conceptual strands guiding the construction of innovative educational and research frameworks. Climate Imaginaries engage with radical ecological change and environmental futures. Historical Imaginaries addresses decolonial approaches to collective memory and nationalist representations, as well as non-aligned movements and intensifying globalisation. Democratic Imaginaries takes its point of departure from the polarisation of the public sphere and emerging forms of illiberalism. Technological Imaginaries is focused on the interactions between art and technological developments and their resulting projections of possible futures.
The Centre is co-chaired by Prof. Mick Wilson and Prof. Natasha Marie Llorens, who together with Prof. Jyoti Mistry and Dr. Axel Andersson form its steering committee.