
photo Kevin Allen
Fresh Talks | National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. USA, Keynote Presenter, With Alice Rawsthorn. A conversation on the role of gender identity in design.

Performance | Intersections: Mapping the Queer Body – in ‘Eleutheria: A Queer European Film & Arts Festival’ – collaboration w/ Isabel Mager + curated by Carlota Jerez.
This performance appropriates the tools of the DJ from a queer, feminist perspective to create a critical landscape of bodies in which questions around identity, sexism, racialization, exploitation, race, or class are at play. The piece combines Maher’s design work, which examines the ‘mediated bodies’ produced in Western digital platforms, with Mager’s work, which focuses on the invisibility of workers’ bodies and exploitative patterns in the production of digital devices, thus subverting and queering systems of image production, consumption, and representation.
Eleutheria as part of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture), Representing the Netherlands, hosted by Frank Schipper. Performance and roundtable at Kulturhuset, Stockholm.

Eleutheria round table discussion after the individual screenings and performances with film maker Victoria Verseau, Designers Gabriel Maher, Isabel Mager, Activist Samuel Girma and curator Carlota Jerez.
Samuel Girma is an Afro-Swedish cultural worker, activist and co-founder of Black Queers Sweden. Girma also works for Swedish film festival CinemAfrica
Victoria Verseau (SWE) is an artist and filmmaker based in Stockholm
Isabel Mager (GER) is an investigative critical designer based in the Netherlands
Moderated by Carlota Jerez, a cultural practitioner and researcher based in Stockholm

Sonic Reading | Stedelijk Museum
Performance & collaboration with Herman Verkerk/EventArchitectuur, Isabel Mager & Gabriel A. Maher & the Props at the Stedelijk Museum Book Club 2017, for the launch of Events Situating the Temporary, 2017

Performance Lecture | HDK – Academy of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg. With professor Judith Seng

Performance | Technologies For Seductive Criticism, DDW 2016, No Particular Order
Performances for Technologies for Seductive Criticism compose a text/image/soundscape and deliver research (digital archives) through the tools of the DJ. Text fragments from the digital archive are fabricated into an absurd script. This script is activated through hybrid readings; spoken word, concrete poetry. The performative outcome combines mechanisms of multi-media performance lecture and technology. The technology acts as a catalyst to understand the development of body-techniques within the digital archive (and digital media platforms).

Design critic Alice Rawsthorn as she moderates a debate about the role of gender identity in design, from early prejudices towards women to contemporary theory.
The conversation considers whether design culture has become less misogynistic, and felt any impact from the ongoing debate about gender transition. The discussion speculates how the evolution of an increasingly eclectic and fluid concept of gender identity will redefine the traditional feminist arguments.
Joining the debate is designer Gabriel A.. Maher and Professor in Design, Linnaeus University, Mathilda Tham.

Design Academy Eindhoven, DDW, 2016 ‘In Need Of …’ The Arena | Round Table – Queering Design. With current graduates Olle Lundin, Isabel Mager, Renee Mes, Floriane Misslin, Josh Wolford. Moderated by DAE alumnus Gabriel Maher.

Design Debate | Frame Magazine
with Frame Magazine editor Enya Moore
The Frame Magazine Analysis was presented to the editors of the magazine and sparked a public dialogue, which was held, in the form of a design debate between the editors and myself. In this way, the research became performative and active while creating a space for dialogue and an opportunity for collaboration.


Performance | De_sign, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam. NAiM / Bureau Europa stage an evening on the rise of performance as a fundamental act of design. Off the Record: Design Performs in the Wormhole between Milan and Rotterdam, with Saskia Van Stein, Tamar Shafiri & Guus Beumer