Gabriel .A. Maher

My work centres on critical and analytical approaches to design-led and artistic research. A central tenet of this practice is to consider the effects of design and the act of designing on the shaping of our bodies, political subjectivities, and identities. This approach prefaces (self)positioning, (self)critique, and cycles of accountability. I seek to create spaces of questioning and doubt towards dominant narratives and paradigms active within design, education, and industry practices.

I enter into close readings of spaces, sites, material artefacts, technologies, and infrastructures to reveal how we — as individuals and communities — are positioned, organised, and directed through design and mediated systems. I deconstruct these entanglements through an affective lens and foreground embodied analysis by engaging performative methodologies. I search for reparative readings by way of aesthetically driven critique.

I traverse my practice as a queer, non-binary person from a working-class background. These intersections directly inform my investigations, which confront conditions that frame our gendered identities, sexuality, and class privileges from a design and power perspective.

I’m a PhD researcher at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. I teach across several Master’s departments at Design Academy Eindhoven — Geo Design Master, Contextual Design Master, Social Design Master.

My work is shared locally and internationally; Venice Architecture Biennale — Space of Other, Dutch Pavilion (2021), Serpentine Galleries Transformation Marathon, Whitechapel Gallery, and Design Museum in London. MAD Museum in New York, National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C, Vitra Design Museum, Milan Salone Del Mobile and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. I co-authored design-led research for Contentious Cities, Design and the Gendered Production of Space, published with Routledge (2020).

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Studio 2.06
de Wittenplaats De Wittenstraat 27
1052 AK Amsterdam