Stefanie Hessler

Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work focuses on interdisciplinary processes, close and long-term collaborations with artists and researchers from different fields, and systems at large, be they ecological, economic, or societal. She is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway since 2019.

She has worked with artists such as Monira Al Qadiri, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Joan Jonas, Candice Lin, Armin Linke, Tabita Rezaire, Tomás Saraceno, Jenna Sutela, Ryan Trecartin, and with institutions such as the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Ocean Space in Venice, Athens Biennale, Bienal de São Paulo, Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing, Flora in Bogota, Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Museum of Modern Art in Recife.

In 2013, Hessler co-founded the art space Andquestionmark in Stockholm (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, an interdisciplinary art and research platform with a focus on human impacts on the oceans. As guest professor in art theory at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm she curated the exhibition Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls (2018).

Hessler regularly writes for publications like Art-Agenda, ArtReview, 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 König Books (2016), and Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, published by The MIT Press (2018). Her new book Prospecting Ocean with a visual essay by Armin Linke and a foreword by Bruno Latour is published by The MIT Press in November 2019.