Biography
Sarat Maharaj is Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems, Lund University/Malmo Art Academy, Sweden as well as Research Professor, Goldsmiths University of London where he was Professor of Art History/Theory (1980–2005). He was the Rudolf Arnheim Professor at the Philosophy Faculty of the Humboldt University, Berlin (2001–2002) and Stedelijk Fellow 2018 at the University of Amsterdam.
His curatorial projects include Gothenburg Biennale: Pandemonium: art in a time of creativity fever (2011); There Is Always a Cup of Sea to Sail, 29th São Paulo Biennale (2010); Farewell to Postcolonialism, Towards a Post-Western Modernity, Guangzhou Triennial (2008); Knowledge Lab, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005); documenta 11, Kassel (2002); and retinal.optical. visual.conceptual…, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2002) with Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk.
Maharaj’s research focuses on Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Richard Hamilton. His publications include Elemental Scatterings: The Sarat Maharaj Reader (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2013); What the Thunder Said in Art as a Thinking Process (Sternberg Press, 2012); Hungry Clouds Swag on the Deep: Santu Mofokeng at Kassel 2002: Chasing Shadows (Prestel, 2011); and Small Change of the Universal: Beyond Modernity? (British Journal of Sociology, 2010).
He received his PhD, titled The Dialectic of Modernism and Mass Culture: Studies in Post War British Art, from the Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Born in 1951 in South Africa, Maharaj currently lives and works between Lund, Sweden and London.