HANIEN CONRADIE
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Hanien Conradie was born in 1972 in Cape Town, South Africa. Her undergraduate education includes degrees in both architecture and fine arts. In 2012-15, she entered a 3 year period of post-graduate studies at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, and graduated with distinction with a Master of Fine Art (2015). Noteworthy scholarships and awards include the National Arts Council Scholarship (2013), the Jules Kramer Music & Fine Art International Bursary(2013-14), the MacIver Scholarship (2014) and the SASA Student Sponsorship Award (2014).
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In her creative practice, South African artist Hanien Conradie investigates sense of place and belonging by examining human-nature relationships. She is interested in tracking the various paths that have led to human alienation from the natural world in the West. Her aim is to discover new ways of relating to natural places, to other human beings and to herself through her work.
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She delivered a paper titled The Voice of Water: Resounding a Silenced River at the Liquidscapes Creative Summit (2018, Dartington Estate, UK). In 2018 she participated in The Ephemeral River, the UK portion of the Global Nomadic Art Project, a 7-year project that supports eco-artists to travel across continents to re-activate the public’s awareness and responsibility towards the biosphere. Here she produced her seminal performance piece Dart, in collaboration with earth-artist Margaret Le Jeune (USA). A still of this film was exhibited on a billboard in New York City as part of a group show titled, I am Water, produced by SaveArtSpace in 2021.
EXPERIENCE
Conradie's Master of Fine Art solo exhibition, Spore, was presented at Michaelis Galleries in 2014. Spore was re-exhibited at WHOW Studios, the Cape Town arts educational venue of the University of South Africa, in 2015.
In the same year Conradie was invited by the AVA Gallery to curate and participate in On Entropy and Becoming, a group show focussing on global ecological concerns. Participating artists included top emerging artists such as Alexandra Karakashian, Maurice Mbikayi and Quanta Gauld.
Conradie has exhibited in numerous group shows, most notably: Imago Mundi: The Art of Humanity(2014-2016) in Rome, Venice and Brooklyn (NY); However (2015), ArtHub, London; Sasol New Signatures Finalists (2016), AVA, Pretoria, and Only Parts(2014), at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
She has participated in various key environmental art exhibitions such as: (In)The Nature of Things(2015), curated for the Hermanus Fynarts Festival by Marilyn Martin, Claims of the Land(2015) AVA Gallery, Cape Town, Liminal Geographies(2016), Barnard Gallery, Cape Town and Global Nomadic Art Project (2016), Cape Town.
Hanien Conradie was represented at the Cape Town Art Fair in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
Conradie is a popular contributor to panel discussions and symposiums around art and ecology. The paper Félix Guattari's The Three Ecologies (an ecological-art dialogue with Quanta Gauld) was, for example, presented by Conradie at the Deleuze and Guattari Symposium in 2015 at the University of Cape Town.
In 2016 she was invited to be a participating artist in the South African portion of the Global Nomadic Art Project (GNAP); a 7 year project which supports eco-artists to travel across continents to re-activate the public's awareness and response.
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SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2021 Spoorloos, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
2019 Raaswater, Cubicle Series, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
2018 Ntlhantle: In the Direction of Beauty, Linnaeus Gallery, Gaborone, Botswana
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2023
The Other’s Warmth, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa
Animal Power!, Brussels Art Week, Montoro12 Contemporary, Brussels, Belgium
A Certain Place, curated by Julia Meintjies, Tokara, South Africa
2022
Earth Power!, Montoro12 Contemporary, Brussels, Belgium
1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, with Montoro12 Contemporary, London, UK
Ebb, Daor Contemporary, Cape Town, South Africa
Nature/Us, GalleryOne11, Cape Town, South Africa
From Spoorloos 2021; a series of paintings about the Tankwa Karoo.
Framed with Glass; Soot Ink on Paper.
THE SPACE BETWEEN, (2021)
SOOT INK ON PAPER
59.4 x 42 cm
Framed
R11 400
The nights in the vast Tankwa Karoo Desert with its black stones and lack of plant life felt very dark and long to me. This painting captures a moment at sunrise as the very first light between night and day appears on the horizon. A threshold space where a place unseen is about to become seen again;where darkness makes space for the light.
STILLNESS, (2021)
SOOT INK ON PAPER
Framed
59.4 x 42 cm
R11 400
There is a stillness in the vast Tankwa Karoo Desert which is devoid of any reference points: no plants, no animals, no water moving. This painting captures this stillness where the only thing you can hear is your breath.
KARMAN LINE, (2021)
SOOT INK ON PAPER
59.4 x 42 cm
Framed
R11 400
When you are in the Tankwa Karoo Desert, you become very aware of the threshold between the
terrestrial and the celestial. The horizon becomes this place of transition between what is known and unknown. From the horizon (moving further and further away from the earth) there are layers within the atmosphere called the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and the exosphere. The Kármán Line is an imagined shifting line in the thermosphere where the Earth’s atmosphere becomes too thin for aeroplanes to achieve flight and where the rest of the universe begins.