Joburg Hymn is a new exhibition in two parts by Robin Rhode, taking place at Stevenson’s Parktown North space and Everard Read’s CIRCA gallery in Rosebank. The exhibition runs until 25 October 2025 and follows the artist’s urgent response and reflection on Johannesburg’s many public spaces that are in decay. 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.’
Joburg Hymn shines a light on the city’s fractured public spaces
Through works created over the past year, artist Robin 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, the artist highlights the vagaries of time’s passage through place at these disintegrating leisure facilities. 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.
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.’
Robin Rhode’s creative process for the show
After moving to Germany in 2002, Rhode developed a system where he would use his studio in Berlin as his laboratory of ideas, and then work on the walls of Joburg. However, for Joburg Hymn, the city in which he grew up becomes both the reference origin 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.
The exhibition is on show at both Stevenson and Everard Read CIRCA’s galleries
In a rare move, two of the leading art galleries in Johannesburg have joined forces to showcase Joburg Hymn. This is the fourth time Stevenson and Everard Read have collaborated, with previous projects in Cape Town and New York between 2016 and 2021.
The collaboration opens 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.
The partnership 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.
Need to know before you go
Cost: FREE entry
When: Running until 25 October 2024. Tuesday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. Saturday, 10am to 1pm
Where: Stevenson Gallery, 46 7th Ave, Parktown North, Randburg, Johannesburg
Website: stevenson.info
Email: [email protected]
Tel: 011 403 1055
Instagram: @stevenson_za
Facebook: @Stevenson.Gallery
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