About

Maja Gunn is an artist, writer, researcher, curator, fashion and costume designer.

Maja Gunn is a Professor of Craft specialized in Textile at HDK-Valand Steneby, Gothenburg University. Maja Gunn has previously worked at Beckman’s School of Design, the Swedish School of Textiles and the University of Halmstad, as well as with several assignments in the arts, design and crafts. She holds a PhD in design with specialization fashion design; an MFA from Konstfack, University College of Art Craft and Design, Stockholm and a Master in Fashion studies, Stockholm University.

In her artistic practice Maja Gunn is interested in body and bodily experiences; identity politics and collective organization; performativity and staging; language and materiality; history writing and power structures. The last couple of years Maja Gunn has had solo exhibitions at eg. The Swedish Textile Museum, Museum Anna Nordlander, Norrbotten Museum and Steneby Konsthall, and participated in group exhibitions at ArkDes, Färgfabriken, New Orleans Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, USA. Together with Karin Ehrnberger and Camilla Andersson, she was curator of the exhibition Norm Form(2017) at ArkDes, an exhibition that showed norm-challenging design, crafts and architecture. Prior to 2021, she works with a couple of solo exhibitions and curating an international exhibition on crafts and materiality in relation to body and intimacy.

Maja Gunn’s research investigates from an artistic perspective body and performativity (mainly in relation to textiles); art and design functions to create social and societal change; as well as the development of artistic methods and their uses. Queer feminist theory and norm-critical perspectives have characterized several of her research projects. Her publication Body Acts Queer – Clothing as a performative challenge to heteronormativity explores bodily experiences of clothes and through such exploration she investigates the clothes’ performative and political functions, with notions of cultural, social and heteronormative structures. It is free to download

Maja Gunn has worked with costumes for several companies and projects: Swedish Television (SVT), Royal Dramatic Theatre (Stockholm), MacArthur Dance Project (New York) and a varied of independent film and theatre projects. Her experience in fashion ranges from retail to ‘high fashion’. Lately her work has been placed in the intersection of design and art, made out from strong conceptual ideas often combined with other elements such as text and performance. Consistently in the works of Maja Gunn is an investigation into and elaboration upon the connection between clothes, body and identity.

Maja Gunn was (together with Karin Ehrnberger and Camilla Andersson) the curator for the exhibition Norm Form at ArkDes in Stockholm. The exhibition showed contemporary design, craft and architecture that expresses norm criticality in varied ways.

Maja Gunn is frequently writing about fashion, gender, identity and popular culture for multiple Magazines and publications.

Maja Gunn Maja_Gunn

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