Gabriel .A. Maher Studio

Gabriel Maher

Gabriel Maher (they/them) is a designer and creative director whose studio operates between cultural analysis and material form. Their practice investigates how media infrastructures organise and affect everyday life, moving between the intimate scale of the body and image and the infrastructural scale of urban media networks. 

Translating critical research into immersive visual, spatial and moving-image work, Maher develops situated interventions that bring hidden relations of power, perception and organisation into view. Grounded in a critical spatial praxis, they develop design methods that cut into technologies, sites, and media systems to reveal the conditions shaping social and spatial experience. These investigations are articulated through spatial interventions, analogue and automated visual montage, film, and writing that function as tools for dialogue and public reflection.

Maher’s current body of work, Cities on Loop, examines the algorithmic transformation of urban space through digital media infrastructures. Developed at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (PhD, University of Amsterdam), the project combines technographic research with visual and spatial methods to explore how geospatial technologies and data-driven media script urban attention, perception and behaviour.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions and presentations at international museums and cultural institutions including:

Serpentine Galleries
Vitra Design Museum
Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York
Het Nieuwe Instituut
Design Museum Barcelona
Design Museum Den Bosch
Centraal Museum
Kunstgewerbemuseum Schloss Pillnitz, Dresden
C-Mine, Genk
Center for Craft, North Carolina

Grants | Awards

Recognition through international awards, research grants and residencies including:

IphiGenia Gender Design Award, iDGN (2019)
Hublot Design Prize, Shortlist (2018)
Stimuleringsfonds Independent Research Grant (2019), with Ro Pérez Gayo
Independent Research Grant, Baltan Laboratories (2019), with Ro Pérez Gayo
Iaspis International Residency, Swedish Arts Grants Committee (2017–2018)
Stimuleringsfonds Talent Development Grant for International Contexts (2016)
Keep an Eye Grant for Alumni (2016)
Stimuleringsfonds Talent Development Grant (2015)
Gijs Bakker Award (2014)
Keep an Eye Grant (2014)

Presentations

Invited lectures, talks and performances across Europe and Australia including:

Whitechapel Gallery
Stedelijk Museum
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Venice Architecture Biennale
Het Nieuwe Instituut
Salone del Mobile
Madrid Design Week
Barcelona Design Week
Dutch Design Week
ACUADS Conference

Publications

Writing explores the relationship between media infrastructures, spatial experience and algorithmic culture, appearing across academic journals, edited volumes and design research publications including:

Cities on Loop: The Algorithmic Rewriting of Public Space in Amsterdam. Doctoral work, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam

Routledge, Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space (2020), with Ro Pérez Gayo

Valiz, The Auto-ethnographic Turn in Design (2021)

Valiz, Social Design | Social Matter (2020)

Sternberg Press, Materialisation in Art & Design (MAD) (2019), with Carly Rose Bedford

Spector Books, The Facit Model: Globalism, Localism & Identity (2018), with Kiki Mager

Nieuwe Instituut, A Reparative Reading of DDW 2019 (ReadingSites, 2019), with Carly Rose Bedford

Studies in Material Thinking, Auckland University of Technology (2016)

Press

New York Times
Frame Magazine
W Magazine
Financial Times
Icon Magazine
Disegno Journal
Eye on Design
Maharam

Pedagogy

Pedagogical work extends this practice through embodied and participatory processes that are spatially situated. Maher teaches at Design Academy Eindhoven (Contextual, Geo and Social Design MA) and has taught widely across art and design institutions in Europe and Australia.

Studio

Studio 2.06
de Wittenplaats
De Wittenstraat 27
1052 AK Amsterdam

CV

gabriel@gabrielmaher.xyz