For a long time, propaganda was presumed to be a word that belonged to a totalitarian past. But our present post-truth era of alternative facts and fake news, shows that propaganda never truly left. From Russian troll armies to Cambridge Analytica, from the Islamic State’s Al-Furqan media channel to the campaigns against “cultural Marxism” in Hungary and beyond, the 21^st century has turned into an arena of a global propaganda struggle. What is the role of propaganda art in this process? How does propaganda art, from the international alt-right to various popular mass movements the world over, shape our reality? Through examples ranging from the cinematic work of Steve Bannon to the revolutionary art of Rojava (West-Kurdistan), as well as his own work, artist and propaganda researcher Jonas Staal discusses the propaganda art practices that make our world today.
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), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020-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.
Exhibition-projects include Museum as Parliament (with the Democratic Self-Administration of Rojava, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2018-ongoing), We Demand a Million More Years (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2022), Extinction Wars (with Radha D’Souza, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2023) and Propaganda Station (Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2024). 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.