Renée Holleman (b. 1978) is a multi-media artist, researcher and writer working across the spheres of visual art, culture, urbanism and sustainability.
Her research-focussed creative practice is oriented towards exploring relationships to land, histories of place, and the residues of colonialism and its conditioning of spatial and temporal ways of knowing.
Recognising the coextensive reduction of cultural and environmental relations within globalizing capitalist frameworks, she has worked actively at the intersection of culture and sustainability within the public sector, to promote cultural democracy within a policy context, and from a creative ecosystems point of view.
She believes that by identifying creativity as an expression of the vitality and diversity of human communities within urban ecosystems, in the same way that we understand biodiversity as intrinsic to healthy biotic communities and natural ecosystems, we can recognise the ways in which creative cities can support the nature of cities.
Renée Holleman lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. She has a Bachelor of Fine Art from Rhodes University, and a Masters in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town. Over the years she has facilitated and collaborated on numerous exhibitions and creative programming initiatives, alongside her research within the urban cultural development context.
Her work has been featured individually and collectively at Rencontres de Bamako (Bamako), Association for Visual Art (Cape Town), Whatiftheworld gallery (Cape Town), Museet for Samtidskunst (Roskilde), Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town) among others.
She is currently directing a pilot initiative at Green Point Park, Cape Town called Field Station.