Selected group exhibitions include 'Imperfect Librarian', Michaelis Galleries, Cape Town, 2012; 'Not Alone', Durban Art Gallery, 2009; Museum Africa, Johannesburg, 2009; 'Of Want and Desire', João Ferreira, Cape Town, 2006; 'A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa', National Center for African American Arts, Boston, 2004; 'City & Country', Axis Gallery, New York, 2004; and 'What is life', South African Museum, Cape Town, 2003.

Maart holds an M.A. in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand and an M.Sc. in Biotechnology achieved with distinction from Rhodes University. This academic background, along with a growing interest in ruin porn in relation to climate change politics, forms the basis of his artist-in-residence at the University of Johannesburg’s new BioArt Facility in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture (FADA).

Artist Statement

My creative work spans many disciplines. Institutional collaborations focus on programme development for arts, culture and development agencies. As a cultural activist, I apply methods to facilitate audience engagement and development. Design programmes include collaborative research and visual communication projects with South African artists and activist organisations. Curatorial works focus on contemporary South African visual art, and manifest in exhibitions, publications and public programmes. Editorial projects include exhibition catalogues and monographs for South African artists and arts organisations. As a writer, published texts reflect a range of interests including the environment, politics, queer life, and an enduring interaction with the South African visual arts sector. As a visual artist, photographic, digital and collage works examine fluxes in political psychologies, with a more recent focus on bioart methodologies of visualisation. A scholarly interest is the application of creative archival practice.

On SYM | BIO | ART

 I have been documenting, photographically, the ruins of buildings in apartheid homelands. The architecture I photograph, like the ideology that spawned it, was conceived and constructed with permanence in mind. Ironically, neither apartheid ideology nor its homeland buildings proved to have the longevity that might have once inspired their germination.

My images have become an archive, and manifest in various form of textual and visual processing, printing and publication. The body of artwork on this exhibition shows the work-in-progress from my bioart residency with the University of Johannesburg’s new Creative Microbiology Research Colab. It demonstrates three different protocols of using microbiological processes to visualise images through selective biomass growth.

The critical question at the heart of my project is: Might the visualisation of apartheid ruins, through the medium of bioart, be used as a metaphor for the putrefying ideologies of capitalism and neo-colonialism?

In Order of Appearance:

Brenton Maart: From the series Ruins of the Ciskei Agricultural Corporation (2023), Bacillus amyloliquefaciens on nutrient agar; Pigment print on cotton rag on M-Foam 5mm, framed in black aluminium with non-reflective glass; 195 x 195 mm (ten pieces); 600 x 600 mm (two pieces); Ed. 10

Brenton Maart: From the series Ruins of Dimbaza Industrial Park, Ciskei (2023), Bacillus amyloliquefaciens on nutrient agar; Pigment print on cotton rag on M-Foam 5mm, framed in black aluminium with non-reflective glass; 940 x 695 mm; Ed. 10