Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work focuses on ecologies, technology, and expanded definitions of life and non-life from an intersectional feminist perspective.
She is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway since 2019, and project co-leader for the large-scale transdisciplinary research project and exhibition “Sex Ecologies” within The Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory. Between 2020–22 Hessler is visiting research scholar at the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media at Westminster University in London, UK. She is curator of the 17th MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, titled “Sensing Nature” in Montreal, Canada (upcoming September 2021).
Recent curatorial projects include “Jenna Sutela: NO NO NSE NSE” at Kunsthall Trondheim (2020); “Down to Earth” (with Thomas Oberender, Tino Sehgal, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and others) at the Berliner Festspiele / Gropius Bau in Berlin, Germany (2020); “Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tomás Saraceno: More- than-humans” at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Spain (2019); “Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II” at Ocean Space in Venice, Italy (2019); the 6th Athens Biennale, Greece (2018); the symposium “Practices of Attention” at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (with D. Graham Burnett, 2018); “Armin Linke: Prospecting Ocean” at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Venice, Italy (2018); “Tidalectics” at TBA21–Augarten in Vienna, Austria (2017); “Fishing for Islands” at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Germany (with Chus Martínez and Markus Reymann, 2017); “Sugar and Speed” at the Museum of Modern Art in Recife, Brazil (2017); and the 8th Momentum Biennial “Tunnel Vision” in Moss, Norway (2015).
In 2013, Hessler co-founded the art space Andquestionmark in Stockholm, Sweden (with Carsten Höller), where she commissioned artists to produce “unsaturated” artworks whose outcome is undetermined, including projects by Pierre Bismuth, Florian Hecker, Christine Sun Kim, and Raimundas Malašauskas. Between 2016–19, she was curator of TBA21–Academy in London, UK, an interdisciplinary art and research platform with a focus on the oceans. Between 2017– 19, she was a guest professor in art theory at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden, where she curated among others the exhibition “Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls” (2018).
Hessler regularly writes for publications like Art-Agenda, ArtReview, Flash Art, and Mousse Magazine. She has edited books like Life Itself, including 173 texts from different disciplines on the unanswerable question of what life essentially is, published by Moderna Museet and Koenig Books (2016), and Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, published by The MIT Press (2018). Her monographic book Prospecting Ocean (with a visual essay by Armin Linke and a foreword by Bruno Latour) was published by The MIT Press in 2019.
