Biografia

Francois Knoetze is a performance artist, sculptor and filmmaker based in Cape Town, South Africa. He has a bachelor in Fine Art from Rhodes University and a Master of Fine Art degree at Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT. Incorporating video, performance and sculpture, his work retraces the lifecycles of discarded objects. Performing as anthropomorphised waste creatures which disrupt the cycle of production, consumption and disposal, he explore the junctures between material and social histories, and how these histories relate to the waste of the present moment. The synthetic is welded to the human – bringing focus to the objectification of persons, through the personification of objects.

His work has been shown at a number of national and international festivals, including a solo exhibition at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival (2015), Artvideo Koeln: Audiovisual Experiences in Cologne (2015), Infecting The City Public Art Festival in Cape Town (2015), ProxyAct International Film Festival in London (2015), the FILMIDEO International Film Festival at the Index Art Center in Newark, New Jersey (2015) and OK.Video Film Festival in Indonesia (2015).
In 2012 he was featured as Art South Africa magazine’s ‘Bright Young Things’ and was recently named one of Mail & Guardian’s ‘Top 200 Young South Africans’ of 2015.