Tracy Murinik is an independent art writer, commentator, educator and curator based in Johannesburg. She writes, curates and teaches on art from South Africa and the continent, and is currently focused on realising an ongoing photographic archive project,
A R C H I V E
: African Repository for the Collation of Historical, Interpretive Visual Explorations. She is also an occasional filmmaker.
She has been a post-graduate lecturer and external examiner in the Fine Art, History of Art and Curatorial Studies Departments in the Wits School of Arts; and a guest lecturer and external examiner to the History of Art and Fine Art departments of the University of Cape Town. She is actively involved in challenging and reshaping the nature of how art theory and art practice are taught in relation to one another – through writing seminars that she runs at
Wits School of Art; through her own practice as a writer and archivist/researcher/curator; and previously in her role as Research and Projects Director at the University of Johannesburg- based Research Centre for Visual Identities in Art and Design.
TRacy’s publications include WIDE ANGLE: Photography as Participatory Practice (2014), http://fourthwallbooks.com/product/wide-angle/], co-edited with Terry Kurgan; Constructure: 100 Years of the JAG Building and its Evolution of Space and Meaning (2015) [digital version at https://issuu.com/designinformation/docs/constructure_-_100_years_of_the_jag] , Minnette Vári’s Of Darkness and of Light (2016); contributor
to Phaidon’s Art Cities of the Future: 21st Century Avant-Gardes, Kari Rittenbach (ed) (2013); 10 Years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa, (ed. Sophie Perryer) (2004); Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art (Museum for African Art, New York and Spier, Cape Town) (2004). Her films comprise a series of thirteen award-winning documentaries – A Country Imagined –which explore the representation of South African landscape by artists, writers, musicians and dancers.