Maja Gunn
About Maja Gunn
Maja Gunn is an artist, designer, curator, researcher and writer. She holds a PhD in design with specialization fashion design. She started working as a professor at HDK-Valand in 2017. 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.
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. During her time as a professor at HDK-Valand, 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 ongoing research includes the Moment to Remember - what films do, which studies artistic methods of, and reactions to, films aimed at people with dementia, as well as the Construction project that investigates and artistically creates the construction of clothing in relation to gender construction . Previous research projects (Origo and FIRe, together with Anna Isaksson, Camilla Andersson, Emma Börjesson, and Karin Ehrnberger) have investigated, from norm-critical perspectives, how design and architecture can promote equality within the rescue service, which has resulted, among other things, in Social Byggnorm (www.socialbyggnorm.se ), a document and a platform aimed at drawing attention to how architecture and social relationships mutually affect each other, as well as disseminating knowledge and examples that can contribute to new ways of thinking and building. Maja Gunn's doctoral dissertation Body Acts Queer - Clothing as a performative challenge to heteronormativity (Gunn, 2016) explores artistic and performative methods to challenge heteronormativity through clothing. Maja Gunn lectures regularly on her artistic practice and research both in Sweden and internationally.
Maja Gunn is Equal treatment representative at HDK-Valand and is a member of the Department's Equal Treatment Group and is an adjunct member of the HDK-Valand Institutional Council. She is research manager at HDK-Valand Steneby and is a member of the HDK-Valand Research Council. Maja Gunn is a Steering Committee member of AgeCap - Sweden's largest research center for aging and health. She is a member of the Board of Education for Artistic and Contextual Studies at Beckmans College of Design. In 2020, Maja Gunn is chair of the Assessment Group for the educational evaluation / review of the subject area Visual Communication at Konstfack. Maja Gunn has been appointed as an expert for Konstnärsnämnden – Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Kulturrådet – Swedish Arts Council and Vinnova – Sweden’s innovation agency.