Michael MacGarry (b. 1978, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a South African visual artist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, moving image, and writing. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town in 2001 and completed a Master of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2006.

MacGarry’s practice examines socio-political and economic narratives through a critical engagement with histories of labour, migration, colonialism, capitalism, and globalisation. Often articulated through a post-humanist and partially autobiographical lens, his work interrogates how structures of power shape both personal experience and collective belief. Across media, he explores the material and psychological residues of industrial modernity, revealing the tensions between human agency, technological systems, and ideological control.

Working frequently with industrial and found materials, MacGarry interrogates cycles of production, consumption, and waste, exposing the fragility and contradictions embedded within economic and political systems. His sculptural and installation-based works often reference monuments, machines, uniforms, and architectural forms, occupying a space between functionality and obsolescence. In the sculptural series Tontine (2010–2012), MacGarry examines speculative economies and collective investment through systems that echo financial mechanisms and social contracts. The ongoing project 100 Suns (2018–) extends his inquiry into labour, endurance, and repetition, using time-based and performative structures to reflect on productivity as both an economic imperative and a psychological condition.

Film and moving image form a significant component of MacGarry’s practice, allowing his concerns to unfold through narrative, speculative, and temporal dimensions. Through these works, he maps shifting relationships between bodies, technologies, and landscapes, situating human subjectivity within broader systems of extraction, circulation, and control.

MacGarry has exhibited and screened work extensively in South Africa and internationally. His work has been presented at institutions and platforms including Tate Modern, Guggenheim Bilbao, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Rencontres de Bamako, VideoBrasil, and major international film festivals such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Film Festival Oberhausen, Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival, and the Flaherty Seminar. His work is held in significant public collections, including the Iziko South African National Gallery, the Wits Art Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Through a rigorous and conceptually driven practice, MacGarry continues to develop a critically engaged visual language that unites formal precision with poetic reflection on power, labour, and the conditions of contemporary life.