Sarat Maharaj (born 1951 in Durban, South Africa) is a writer, researcher, curator, and professor. [1]
Maharaj's family was part of the large group of Indians who migrated to the province of KwaZulu-Natal in the nineteenth century. The grandfather of Maharaj worked in sugar plantations as a contract worker.
As a child, Maharaj witnessed the effects of racial segregation under the Apartheid regime. During his university studies, Maharaj had to travel by ferry to the University College for Indians, located on Salisbury Island off the coast of Durban. These experiences made him sensitive to the violence that was inherently present in classification systems.
Maharaj eventually left South Africa for Britain. In 1980, he began his doctorate at Goldsmiths. His thesis was The Dialectic of Modernism and Mass Culture: Studies in Post War British Art. He is an authority on the work of Richard Hamilton, Marcel Duchamp, and James Joyce. [2] He is a Professor of Visual Arts and Knowledge Systems at the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University in Sweden and was Professor of Art and Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, London from 1980 to 2005.
Maharaj has held visiting professorships and fellowships at several institutions including Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and Humboldt University, Berlin. His writings, curatorial projects, and presentations have appeared all over the world. Maharaj is also a member of the advisory board of the journal Third Text .
Curatorial projects include:
Maharaj lives and works in London and Lund. [3]
Richard William Hamilton CH was an English painter and collage artist. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, are considered by critics and historians to be among the earliest works of pop art. A major retrospective of his work was at Tate Modern until May 2014.
Olu Oguibe is a Nigerian-born American artist and academic. Professor of Art and African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, Oguibe is a senior fellow of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. He is also an art historian, art curator, and leading contributor to post-colonial theory and new information technology studies. Oguibe is also known to be a well respected scholar and historian of contemporary African and African American art and was honoured with the State of Connecticut Governor's Arts Award for excellence and lifetime achievement on 15 June 2013.
Sonia Dawn Boyce, is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than 30 years in several art colleges across the UK.
From 1993 to 2012, The London Consortium was a graduate school in the UK offering multidisciplinary Masters and Doctoral programs in the humanities and cultural studies at the University of London. It was administered by Birkbeck, University of London, one of the constituent colleges of the University of London, and fell under the Humanities list of courses at Birkbeck.
Rita Donagh is a British artist, known for her realistic paintings and painstaking draughtsmanship.
Nancy Adajania is am Indian cultural theorist, art critic and independent curator.
Beatriz Colomina is an architecture historian, theorist and curator. She is the founding director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture and Director of Graduate studies in the School of Architecture.
Iwona Maria Blazwick OBE is a British art critic and lecturer. She is currently the Chair of the Royal Commission for Al-'Ula’s Public Art Expert Panel. She was the Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from 2001 to 2022. She discovered Damien Hirst and staged his first solo show at a public London art gallery, Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1992. She supports the careers of young artists.
Bisi Silva was a Nigerian contemporary art curator based in Lagos.
Richard Grayson is a British artist, writer and curator. His art practice encompasses installation, video, painting and performance. He investigates ways that narratives shape our understandings of the world. His art and curatorial practice focus on narrative and the visual arts, belief systems and material expression, and ways cultural practices allow translation between the subjective and social/political realms.
Charles Townsend Harrison, BA Hons (Cantab), MA (Cantab), PhD (London) was a UK art historian who taught Art History for many years and was Emeritus Professor of History and Theory of Art at the Open University. Although he denied being an artist himself, he was a full participant and catalyst in the Art and Language group.
Iniva is the Institute of International Visual Art, a visual arts organisation based in London that collaborates with contemporary artists, curators and writers. Iniva runs the Stuart Hall Library, and is based in Pimlico, on the campus of Chelsea College of Arts.
Virginia Agyeiwah Nimarkoh is a British artist and activist, based in London. Nimarkoh was born in London, and studied at Goldsmiths College London from 1986 to 1989, graduating with a PhD in Fine Art. Her practice combines mostly photographic and curatorial projects. She also works in community development and environmental regeneration initiatives across London. She currently works mainly with food, running a raw food business and food insecurity social enterprise in London.
Irit Rogoff is a writer, theorist, teacher and curator. Her research interests include visual culture; contemporary art and critical theory; postcolonialism, geoculture, and geographies, cultures of education and gender. Rogoff obtained her PhD degree from the Courtald Institute of Art in 1987.
Kathryn Smith is a South African artist, curator, and researcher. She works on curatorial projects, scholarly research, and studio practices, while her art deals with uncertainty, risk, and experimentation. She works in Cape Town and Stellenbosch. Her works have been exhibited and collected in South Africa and elsewhere. In 2006, she was appointed senior lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Stellenbosch and head of the Fine Arts Studio Practice program. She took a break in 2012/2013 to read for an MSc at the University of Dundee.
Mohammad Salemy is a Canadian artist, art critic, curator, writer . curator, writer He is sometimes referred to as "Mo Salemy".
The British pavilion houses Great Britain's national representation during the Venice Biennale arts festivals.
John Fleetwood is a South African photography curator, educator who was from 2002 to 2015 director of Market Photo Workshop and has since 2016 been director of Photo: in Johannesburg.
Anselm Franke is a German curator, and writer. He has been the head of Visual Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2013.
Thiagarajan Kanaga Sabapathy, better known as T.K. Sabapathy, is a Singaporean art historian, curator, and critic. Sabapathy has written, researched, documented, and supported contemporary visual art in Singapore and Malaysia for four decades. He has held positions at the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological Institution, and National Institute of Education as a lecturer of art history. Sabapathy further established and headed pioneering art research facilities in Singapore, such as the Contemporary Asian Art Centre (2001–2004) and subsequently, Asia Contemporary (2015–).