The practice of Johanna Gustafsson Fürst (born 1973, lives and works in Stockholm) spans across a wide range of media. Text, performance, object and site-specific installations are used to think about how a society's structures and ideas materialize in its
public spaces and how these spaces function or not function in collective processes of transformation in the power structures. Johanna Gustafsson Fürst often engages in long-term processes involving a specific locality and its contexts. The processes deal, for example, with how everyday-life encounters politics and how this merges into objects and spaces that affect human relationships. For example: a residential area, Husby, in Stockholm or the traditional glass-industry area in southern Sweden, currently undergoing a transition to post-industrialism. Gustafsson Fürst often uses found items and materials that refer to a place and a function, including the specific stories they carry into the work.
In 2017 she received the Friends of Moderna Museet Sculpture Prize. Part of the jury's motivation read: “She challenges the materials, their properties and common uses, in order to create an inverted, suspended, not to say unyielding, sculptural otherness.” Johanna has an MFA (2003) from the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Stockholm. She is a senior lecturer in the Fine Art Department at Konstfack in Stockholm.
