Born in Stockholm, Ola Pehrson passed away in Ljusdal, Sweden. Working with video and new technology, he used the computer as both a functional and a symbolic element.  Pehrson’s oeuvre pondered media and communication, technology, and the large-scale systems that both form our behavioural patterns and register our lives. He played with metaphors and made visible (and audible) the powerful forces and structures that shape us as individuals and govern our societies. One of his most well-known installations is Yucca Invest Trading Plant, 1999.

Every plant is in itself a perfectly economical system, with a minimum of waste, with its own resources, something which certainly can’t be said of many companies.  A yucca palm tree has been chosen as a representative of a typical plant for a young urban businessman. The plant has been exposed to six months of intensive market education, during which it has been fed with stock market rates encoded into electric currents, combined with an index-related conditioning diet of either rich or meagre rations of water and sunlight. This is an attempt to stimulate a market-adapted habitus, similar to that which years of financial transactions develop in the experienced stock brokers’ nervous system.

Ola Pehrson’s solo exhibitions include: Yamaguchi Art Museum, Japan; Galeria Noua in Bucharest; and Art Statements at the Basel Art Fair. Recent group exhibitions: Momentum – Festival of Nordic Art, Moss, Norway; Channel_O in Japan (touring exhibition); Delayed on Time, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia; Scream, Färgfabriken, Stockholm; Se Bashku, Tirana Biennial, Albania; and Organising Freedom, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.