Sarat Chandra Maharaj
Lives and works in London and Maastricht.
Co-Curator Documenta11.
Professor for Art History and Art Theory, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Research Project Fellow, Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht.
Rudolf Arnheim-Professur, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin.

Education

University of Reading, Great Britain. Ph.D. 1985, "The Dialectic of Modernism and Mass Culture: Studies in Postwar British Art".
University of South Africa, Witwatersrand & assessor Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Master of Arts. University of South Africa, Durban. (For Blacks of Indian Origin). Bachelor of Arts in Art History, Fine Art and English.
Curatorial work (Selection)

2001
Optical.Retinal.Visual.Conceptual. Museum Boijmanns van Beuningen, Rotterdam. The North European optical oil painting tradition explored through a commissioned map by Richard Hamilton and Sarat Maharaj of Marcel Duchamp’s White Box annotations to the Large Glass.
2000-02
Xeno-sonics. Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture, Bordeaux. Digital suite of visuals and sound collages (Shannon’s Theory of communication, Jacques Monod´s DNA sequences and Doverbeach). For Sonic City, Mutations.
2000
Textiles 2000. Selector/Curator of textile experimental art in the UK (with Yinka Shonibare).
1997-98
In(ter)dependence: India and the aura of the hand-made in the age of digital reproduction. (Proposed theme and sample list of objects). Crafts Council project to mark 50 years of India’s independence (1998).
New Contemporaries. Cornerhouse, Manchester 1997
Camden Arts Centre 1997
Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow 1997-98. Selector/Curator (with Hans Ulrich Obrist & Gillian Wearing).
Lectures (Selection)

2000
Retinal Regimes and Colonial Art Schooling.
Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (14.6.).
Dissolvent Rationality & Dissolvent Retinality:
Art in the post-post-Gutenberg mega-visual system.
The Enlightenment International Symposium, Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht (27.5.).
China Sutras. Production sites of visual arts knowledge.
Symposium on New Asia Museum, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver.
Visual Regimes: Production sites of visual arts knowledge.
Art Academies Honju, Shanghai, Beijing, Kwangju, China and Taipeh, Taiwan.
Historical Perspectives on Black & Asian Art in Britain.
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (3.3.).
Global Production: National Clichés & Local Differences.
Madrid (14.2.).
1999
A-vidya or Non-Knowledge in the Visual Arts arena.
Paper to Art, Academies of Scandinavia, Stockholm (4.12.).
No place for cosmopolitans?
Nexus Conference, University of Tilburg, Netherlands (1), New York (2), Jerusalem (3), Neu Delhi (4) (8.10.99 - 2000).
George Perec: Order & The Dislocuted Archive.
Symposium on ethnographical practices. Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden (26.6.).

Publications (Selection)

Dislocations. Interim entries for a Dictionaire Élémentaire on cultural translation. In: Reverberations, Ed. Jean Fisher, Jan Van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht 2000.
Sounding difference. Über den Umgang mit kultureller Differenz ....die kulturelle Übersetzung. In: Springerin. Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, Band V1, Vienna 2000.
Dislocations. In: Circa. Irish & International Contemporary Art. Spring 1991. (English revised and extended version).
Fatal natalities: on cultural translation. Artspace, Sydney, 2000.
Work in Pre-gross. Essays, anti-essays and para-epistemologies. Selected experimental writing by Sarat Maharaj, Design: Typosophic Society, Iniva/Arts Council of England, November 2000.
China Sutras. Retinalism and global conceptualism in the field of Post-colonial Visual Art Schooling. Sussex University Press/University Vienna 2000.

Publications in preparation

A double-cressing, visible grammar. The Robert Lehman lecture. DIA Foundation, New York.
A Strife of Tongues: Richard Hamilton/Marcel Duchamp/James Joyce. Text by Sarat Maharaj designed by Richard Hamilton. Typosophic Society / Springer Press, Wien und Hansjörg Mayer, Stuttgart 2001. Research funded by Leverhulme Trust & Arts Council of Great Britain & The British Academy. The book looks at 20 century visual arts developments through links between Duchamp/Joyce/Hamilton. The study opens onto issues of the long-term fate of art in the consumerist culture industry, conceptual vs. visual dialectic, signature, simulation and post-post Gutenberg technologies, the tussle between visual semiosis and chaosmosis, models of visual practice as idea and experiment and ethical-aesthetic paradigms emergent in today’s visual practice. Chapter 2 of A Strife of Tongues has come out in The Duchamp Effect (MIT, Cambridge, Mass. 1997).
semi-semitic serendipitist...you...Europasiansied Afferyank!: xeno-sounding, cultural translation, difference and clitorality. Selected essays, talks, schooling projects on cultural difference and diversity and the visual-sonic. NERVE series edited by Sue Golding for Routledge 2001.
Circum-hyper-hypo typotranslating the White Box. Text to Lingua Franca.
English/French typotranslation of Marcel Duchamp’s White Box notes, Typosophic Society, Vienna/London.