― ART TALKS! at the ROYAL ACADEMY ― 4 February, 16:00h
→ SARAT MAHARAJ
→ at Korte Zaal (lokaal 06), Royal Academy, Mutsaardstraat 31
→ FREE entrance
― BE WELCOME!
⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸
Sarat Maharaj: “James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a “museum” of world history, housed in a prehistoric passage tomb, opens the topic out onto a look at correspondences between the ‘out of Africa’ prehistoric migrations and the migrations today to Europe, within the frame of North/South evolutionary models of development, modernity and globalization. Archival consciousness, historical thought and imagination in the contemporary, curating as analytical process and knowledge production. An ethics of ‘living with difference and multiplicity’, questions of identity and belonging, the critique of multiculturalism and institutional notions of diversity.”
⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸ ⫸
BIO
Sarat Maharaj was born in South Africa and educated there as well as in the UK. Dr. Maharaj is a writer and curator. He was a co-curator of documenta11 and he curated retinal .optical. visual.conceptual … at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 2002, with Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk. Dr. Maharaj was also co-curator of Farewell to Postcolonialism, Guangzhou, in 2008, and Art, Knowledge and Politics, at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo in 2010. He was Chief Curator of the 2011 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Pandemonium: Art in a Time of Creativity Fever, and a peer advisor to the Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013.
His PhD dissertation was entitled “The Dialectic of Modernism and Mass Culture: Studies in Post War British Art” (University of Reading, UK). Between 1980 and 2005, he was Professor of History and Theory of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr. Maharaj was also the first Rudolf Arnheim Professor, Humboldt University, Berlin (2001–02) and Research Fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht (1999–2001).
Dr. Maharaj was 2018 Visiting Fellow at RKD — Netherlands Institute for Art History, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the University of Amsterdam (UvA), in which role he gave lectures such as “Cultural Studies: Towards a Theory/Practice Approach” as well as presented a reconstruction/re-enactment of The Apartheid-era Art History Room, Salisbury Island, Durban, South Africa (c. 1971) with students from UvA and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, at the Stedelijk Museum, in May and June 2018. In the same year, he participated and lectured in the international seminar So prettly prattly pollylogue pt. 2: a James Joyce day, organised by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
Dr. Maharaj is furthermore currently working on two art research projects: “Repristinating London: Knowledge Mecca, Sandwich Street, Bloomsbury” and “The Apartheid Art History Room, Durban, Salisbury Island,” which involves sounding art practice as a mode of non-knowledge or “Ignorantitis sapiens.”
His specialist research and publications focus on Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, and Richard Hamilton, and his writing covers: Monkeydoodle—“thinking through art practice,” visual art as know-how and no-how, textiles, xeno-sonics and xeno-epistemics—”thinking the other and other ways of thinking,” cultural translation, “dirty cosmopolitanism,” North/ South divisions of work, manufacture, and “creative labour.”
Recent publications include “Weggebobbles to Virginatarian: The Alimentary Passage through the Vegan and Beyond in James Joyce’s Foodscape” for the menu (by Seppe Nobels) for the Bloomsday dinner at the XXVI International James Joyce Symposium: The Art of James Joyce, University of Antwerp, 2018; Elemental Scatterings: The Sarat Maharaj Reader (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2013); “Small Change of the Universal,” British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010); Hungry Clouds Swag on the Deep: Santu Mofokeng at Kassel 2002: Chasing Shadows (Prestel, 2011); Sounding South Africa: in the Rainbow State (2012); “The Jobless State: The Global Assembly Line, Indolence,” in Work, Work, Work: A Reader on Art and Labour (Iaspis, 2012); “What the Thunder Said,” in Art as a Thinking Process (Sternberg Press, 2012); “Nicky-Nacky to Bunga-Bunga: Venice Preserv’d in the Global Assembly Line of Biennials,” in Venezia, Venezia (Actar, 2013); and “The Surplus of the Global,” a conversation with Marion von Osten, Texte zur Kunst, September 2013.