Biography

Hanien Conradie’s education includes degrees in both Architecture and Fine Arts. In 2012, she entered a 3-year period of post-graduate studies at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (UCT).  She graduated (with distinction) with a Master of Fine Art (2015) focused on an enquiry based on ecology and painting. Conradie has since participated in numerous ecological exhibitions located in Southern Africa, Europe and the USA.

Conradie is an active contributor to interdisciplinary symposiums, websites and artists’ residencies where ecological research is conducted through creative practice. She, for example, delivered a paper at the Deleuze and Guattari Symposium (2015, UCT), at the Global Nomadic Art Project’s Symposium (2016, Cape Town) and 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.

Conradie’s first solo exhibition, Ntlhantle: In the Direction of Beauty, was held at the Linnaeus Gallery in Gaborone, Botswana (2018). This show explored the sacred sites of South Eastern Botswana and was accompanied by a walk-about where a local African medicine doctor told the stories of these places. The painting titled Matsieng, the place of the Matsieng creation story, is included in the Grade 7 Life Orientation textbook published by the South African Department of Education (2021). Her last solo exhibition, Raaswater (2019), formed part of the Cubicle Series at the Circa Everard Read Gallery in Cape Town and included a series of discussions with indigenous knowledge expert, Colin Campbell, to explore the links between traditional rainmaking rites of Southern Africa and the creative process. In 2019 and 2020 Conradie participated in the Artscape Artists’ Residency in the Tankwa Karoo where she continued to explore human relationship with land through painting, performance and poetry.  These works were exhibited at her solo exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery, Cape Town (2021); titled Spoorloos. Currently Conradie is working on her next solo exhibition and taking part in various earth concerned group exhibitions.