Hans Ramduth
area: Art & Theory
Key Facts
nationality
Mauritiusarea
Art & Theoryresidence
Mauritiusrecommending institution
SCHAURAUM Angewandtetime period
November 2023 - November 2023Hans Ramduth (b. 1970) studied Art History in Shantiniketan, an alter-modernist art university, near Kolkata in India.
As a multi-disciplinary creative and academic, he has worked variously as cartoonist, puppeteer, documentary film maker and voice actor both for local and international audiences. He has authored one book in 2007 on the post-independence visual arts of Mauritius, and then embarked on a PhD, on the dynamics of identity construction in the field of visual culture of Mauritius (completed in 2015).
He has been a curator, member of selection panels and as a member of the UNESCO African team for the 2005 Convention, advised Mauritian government on the creative policies of the island.
His visual work ranges from video and animation, to installation and paper-making and drawing. He is interested in Global South cultural responses to the multi-dimensional crisis of the Anthropocene.
During his residency at the MQ, Hans Ramduth tries to reconciling the digital and the analog in his art practice.
He is working on a series of ink works on handmade paper that address the issue of a “global failure of the imagination” (Ghosh), using a number of visual personas he developed digitally.
He would like to deepen his understanding of Austrian artist Hundertwasser’s conceptualization of the five skins, especially the relationship between the fourth "skin" (social identity) and the fifth "skin" (planetary ecosystems), according to him, have become crucial to contemporary predicaments.
He hopes that the visual narratives of the deep history of the Indian Ocean – via legendary and mythical Anthropocene personas – will spark interesting discussions and opportunities for further collaboration with his Viennese interlocutors.
Hans Ramduth opens his exhibition Submergence & Emergence