Johannesburg

STEVENSON is pleased to present Joburg Hymn, an exhibition in two parts by Robin Rhode, taking place at our Parktown North space and Everard Read’s CIRCA.

This is the fourth time the two galleries have collaborated, following projects in Cape Town and New York between 2016 and 2021. These moments reflect a long-running conversation about the audience for contemporary art in Johannesburg, in which CIRCA – with its open architecture, unusual scale and central location – has played a central role from its inception. In this instance, the convergence between spaces brings together multiple audiences while foregrounding the relationship between space and medium in Rhode’s Joburg Hymn. At CIRCA, the artist presents video works and animations, and at Stevenson he exhibits drawings and photography.

After moving to Germany in 2002, Rhode developed a system where he would use his studio in Berlin as his laboratory of ideas, then work on the walls of Joburg. For Joburg Hymn, the city in which he grew up becomes both the seat of reference and the place of execution.

Instead of the art-historical concepts and colour theories that have informed recent series, his new photographs, paintings and videos reflect personal experiences of Joburg’s complex socio-economic milieu. Through works created over the last year, Rhode takes performative and absurdist action to pay homage to a city in constant renegotiation and renewal, stating:

The show is a celebration, but at the same time I am occupying spaces in Jozi that are in decay. The context that I’m operating in reflects a larger discourse on the decay and collapse of structures and systems within South Africa. The question I’m asking is, how do we confront these crumbling structures and at the same time inject a life into them? How do we create new meanings for structures that are collapsing?

Animations such as Garden Service, Stage 15, Padel and Day Zero were created in disused sports grounds in the West Rand. Beyond their appearance as found abstract compositions, these disintegrating leisure facilities are engaged by the artist to highlight the vagaries of time’s passage through place. Across these works, he uses chalk instead of paint to index the possibilities of erasure and reinscription.

One of the key works in this vein, Portrait with Keys, references the 2008 novel by Ivan Vladislavić, who Rhode has described as a guide in articulating his own experiences of the city. In the work, a figure is seen navigating a landscape of keys which, as totems of access and possession, become distillate portraits of individual lives within Joburg. The soundtrack to this work is composed by South African piano prodigy Qden Blaauw. In December 2023, Rhode collaborated with Blaauw at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation for a new rendition of his 2009 performance, Pictures Reframed, centred around Modest Mussorgsky’s classical piano suite.

In Portrait with Keys, Vladislavić writes:

In Johannesburg, the Venice of the South, the backdrop is always a man-made one. We have planted a forest the birds endorse. For hills, we have mine dumps covered with grass. We do not wait for time and the elements to weather us, we change the scenery ourselves, to suit our moods. Nature is for other people, in other places.

June’s Window and the Jacaranda Vignettes, works central to this exhibition, best exemplify the resonance between Rhode and the writer. The former is shown as a slide projection in which the artist and an armed collaborator are seen burying drawings at a mine dump. Documented in 2006, this ritual using sketches of domestic implements belonging to June – Rhode’s mother - at the man-made hill visible from her kitchen window, acts as a historical counterpoint to his new work and combines drawing, performance and photography. The Jacaranda Vignettes, his most recent work, equally crosses the lines between disciplines and reflects a turn in his photographic practice; each piece is unique and features a drawing of Joburg’s iconic Jacaranda blooms overlaid on monochromatic images of his doppelgangers performing at the wall he has engaged with over the last decade.

Across Joburg Hymn, Rhode centres improvisation and imagination within the reality of struggle. He continues: ‘I see my job, my duty, as an artist as to revitalise these spaces.’

The CIRCA iteration of Joburg Hymn opens on Thursday 15 August from 5 to 8.30pm, followed by the opening at Stevenson on Saturday 17 August from 10am to 2pm.