SHORT BIO

Malin Arnell (b. 1970, Stockholm and Utrecht) is an artist, researcher, and educator whose practice unfolds through performance, installation, and long-term collaborative processes. Working at the intersections of feminist, queer, posthuman, and ecological perspectives, Arnell develops ways of knowing-through-doing—artistic methods that are embodied, relational, and site-responsive.

Over the past twenty-five years, Arnell has been committed to creating spaces of artistic processes, collective experimentation, and learning, where art becomes a way of tending to our entangled social and ecological worlds. Early feminist collaborations include High Heel Sisters (2002–2007), a performance collective using public interventions to explore gender, representation, and labour, and YES! Association / Föreningen JA! (2005–2017), a feminist art workers’ association addressing structural change in art institutions. These projects established the socially engaged, site-specific, and performative strategies that underpin Arnell’s later research.

This commitment has also taken the form of extended collaborations such as Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge (2018–2069, with Åsa Elzén), a fifty-year project of forest stewardship and artistic research, and In Each Other’s Company (2018–ongoing, with Mar Fjell), a platform for queer-feminist artistic companionship and sustainable forms of working together.

Arnell’s work has been shaped by deep dialogues with communities, curators, and places—whether through collective forest walks, participatory performances by the water, or durational installations that unfold over days and years. Their residencies at Røst Air on the remote island of Skomvær (2015, 2017, 2018), Saari Residence, Kone Foundation, Finland (2019), The Watch in Berlin (2021), Mustarinda’s forest environments in Finland (2023, 2024), and at Artica, Svalbard (2025), have offered spaces to practice attention, care, and long-term ecological imagination. Within the queer feminist art and performance community in New York City, Arnell founded and facilitated Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner (2009–2010, with Johanna Gustavsson) and The Oncoming Corner (2012–2015), programmes dedicated to dialogue, collective learning, and experimental performance.

Alongside their artistic practice, Arnell has maintained a long-standing commitment to teaching and mentorship. They have led both BFA and MFA courses at institutions such as Konstfack – University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, and The Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå University, shaping curricula, guiding students through experimental and collaborative processes, and serving as class director for multiple cohorts. Their pedagogical work emphasizes relational learning, feminist and ecological perspectives, and research-through-practice, creating spaces where students engage critically with both artistic and social questions. Earlier teaching assignments include a focus on choreography and artistic research at Stockholm University of the Arts, reflecting Arnell’s interest in performance as a method of inquiry and knowledge-making.

Their works have been presented internationally—from museums and biennales such as Something Else III, Off Biennale Cairo (2024), The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2015), Moderna Museet Stockholm (2010), to self-organised gatherings—and are often developed in close collaboration with commissioning institutions and local communities.

Arnell holds a PhD in Fine Arts in Choreography (Stockholm University of the Arts & Lund University, 2016), where their dissertation Avhandling / Av_handling (Dissertation / Through_action) took the form of a 72-hour live performance. They are currently a Postdoctoral Artistic Researcher within the ERC-funded project RESPIRE: Planetary Breathing in Asphyxiating Times at Utrecht University, contributing to interdisciplinary explorations of forests, oceans, and soils as planetary lungs.

If you want to know more about my work – my collaborations, research or teachings – you can contact me HERE