Francois Knoetze is a performance artist, filmmaker and sculptor, currently based in Cape Town. He received his MFA from Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town (2015). His works have been presented at a wide range of national and international group exhibitions and festivals, including the Afropixel Festival & Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar (2018), LagosPhoto Festival, Nigeria (2015), and Syngenta Photo Awards Exhibition at Somerset House, London (2017). Knoetze’s practice explores the life cycles of discarded objects and the intersections of material and social histories.
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Francois’ project Core Dump is an ongoing series of performances, video installations, and interviews that draw on audiovisual archives, early African cinema and daily life in the cities of Dakar and Kinshasa. During the fellowship, Knoetze has been investigating the contradictions of a techno-utopian ideal in countries, such as China, that feeds off of an exploitative relationship with Africa. He has been examining how Dakar and Kinshasa are both the starting point for technological objects, created from locally extracted minerals, and acts as an endpoint for these same objects, which are dumped as electronic waste from Europe, Asia and the USA.
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