Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy and propaganda.
Much of his work is collaborative, performative and critically utopian. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit. Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook. With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union.
Current and recent exhibition projects include Museum as Parliament (with the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava and Van Abbemuseum), We Demand a Million More Years (at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2022), Extinction Wars (with Radha D'Souza, at the Gwangju Museum of Art, 2023) and Propaganda Station (in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2024). His work has been exhibited at venues such as the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, V&A in London, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, MUHKA 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.
Staal is a writer, too, with a PhD from the PhD Arts program in Leiden.
Publications related to this include Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019) and Climate Propagandas: Stories of Extinction and Regeneration (The MIT Press, 2024).
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