Shadow Art World: An Introduction (Lecture)

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? 

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-Metz and 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. 

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).