Sarat Maharaj was born and educated in South Africa during the Apartheid years. He is currently Professor of Visual Art and Knowledge Systems at Lund University and Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. He was Professor of Art History and Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London (1980-2005).

Maharaj is a writer and curator. He was o-curator of Documenta11 (2002) and he curated retinal.optical.visual.conceptual., at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam with Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk. He was also the co-curator of Farewell to Postcolonialism, Guangzhou (2008) and Art, Knowledge and Politics, at the 29th Bienal de São Paulo (2010). He was Chief Curator of the 2011 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Pandemonium: Art in a Time of Creativity Fever, and a peer advisor to the Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013.

His research and publications focus on Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, and Richard Hamilton, and his writing covers Monkeydoodle: Annotating the Anti-Essay “After History” and “Know-how and No-How: stopgap notes on “method”, as well as cultural translation and difference, textiles, xeno-sonics and xeno-epistemics, “thinking the other and other ways of thinking”, “dirty cosmopolitanism,” and North/South divisions of work, manufacture, and “creative labour.”

In 2008, Sarat Maharaj co-curated Farewell to Post-Colonialism: Third Guangzhou Triennial with ICAST, and in 2010, he participated in the West Heavens: India-China Summit on Social Thought forum, followed by an invitation from ICAST to deliver a lecture at CAA entitled “Everyone Should Have Their Own Path to Duchamp.”