Written by Danijela Cook
Johannesburg is a city of contrasts, defined as much by its frustrations and paranoia as by its comfort and charm. Its residents are familiar with the paradoxical mix of hopelessness and humour, fear and friendliness. For the past 30 years, Stephen Hobbs has grappled with how to capture this complexity. As both an artist and urbanist, his work has been inseparable from the city. His recent survey exhibition at the Wits Art Museum, titled Man Shouting in Distance, explores Johannesburg’s layered identity and considers the ways in which spaces both shape and are shaped by the stories that occupy it.
Over the past three decades, Hobbs has earned his stripes as a cultural practitioner and significant contributor to Johannesburg’s art landscape. Hobbs has navigated the city, the body, and the mind with grit, arriving at a point in his career where he seems more at peace, perhaps less tethered to the weight of the city.
After graduating with a BAFA from the University of the Witwatersrand, Hobbs became the curator of the Market Theatre Gallery in 1994, a role he held until 2000. During this pivotal period of the country’s restructuring, he played a crucial role in fostering space for cultural practices in Johannesburg, largely informed by the context of Newtown and its surrounding areas. Beyond his tenure at the gallery, Hobbs co-founded The Trinity Session, an artist collective that facilitates cultural projects through urban space-making. Trinity’s most notable public art projects include the Juta Street Trees (2006), coordination of Clive van den Berg’s Eland (2007), The Vilakzai Street Precinct (2010) and the ArtMyJozi placemaking programmes through art (2017-2022).
With Hobbs’ rich history in mind and the intricate layering of themes, mediums and installations in the exhibition, it becomes evident that the energy of Johannesburg lives through his work. Hobbs has often referred to the city as his medium, and in many ways, his practice has centred on the challenging question of how to tell the story of Johannesburg, a subject so complex and multifaceted.
Stepping into Gallery 1 of the Wits Art Museum, the audience was confronted by an imposing installation of structural rectangles. Bathed in dramatic lighting, these forms cast angular shadows on the walls and floor, accompanied by stream-of-consciousness type text that reads phrases synonymous with Jozi life – gunshots, groans and of course, man shouting in distance. This opening work is indicative of Hobbs’ fascination with defensiveness in Johannesburg. The hard-edged geometry and interplay of light and shadow evoke an aerial view of a city grid, a rigid, almost militaristic map of space.
Leading on from this installation, the viewer encounters video works that document his previous mural projects, blending the languages of public art and urban intervention, video artworks that conjure urban life as well as various mixed media works.
Man Shouting in Distance reveals how ideas of defensiveness, entropy and precarity have been integral in Hobbs’ digestion of the city. These ideas are not mere conceptual standpoint but are presented as the components that make up the very fabric of the city. Hobbs uses architectural forms in his works on paper, alongside reinterpretations of dazzle camouflage (originally employed as a defence tactic in World War I) and everyday materials like cardboard and reflective tape to explore this. Through these mediums, he captures the physical and psychological experience of navigating life in Johannesburg, where the boundaries between stability and uncertainty are constantly shifting.
The video work 54 Stories (1998), also referred to by Hobbs as a ‘suicide film,’ opens with a fleeting glimpse of a young Hobbs, followed by disorienting, tumbling visions of a fall. To create the film, Hobbs tied a Super 8 camera to a coat hanger and taped plastic packet – a makeshift parachute that reflects the resourceful ingenuity often associated with Joburgers. The camera was then hurled from the top floor of the notorious Ponte City tower, capturing an emulated freefall. The resulting footage speaks to the psychological strain of living in compact, high-rise environments.
Ponte, originally marketed as a trendy, cosmopolitan development, has since become a symbol of the entropy that engulfs much of Johannesburg. The building now teeters between decline and renewal, neither wholly habitable nor entirely forsaken; a metaphor for the unpredictability that permeates the city’s inner areas. This instability weighs heavily on its residents, who live through the uncertainty of a city on the brink, their sense of hope eroded while public and private powers deliberate on where to invest their resources. As buildings rise, decay, or become gentrified, residents are forced to navigate these cycles – people are made to mirror the city.
Hobbs displays obsessive inquiries into the characteristics of the inner city. This is proven in a unique installation of two whiteboards, filled with frenzied scribbles mapping out Hobbs’ life and career. These overlapping diagrams document significant moments, both personal and professional, interspersed with his medical history – a theme that is later introduced in the exhibition. This frantic layering of information, in the form of a mind map, speaks to Hobbs’ precarity, looking at intersections between his personal and artistic life; drawing us into his lived experience of the city.
Rather than simply dwelling on the bleakness of Johannesburg’s urban precariousness, Man Shouting in Distance offers a more human perspective, focusing not just on the structural changes but on the lives lived within them. In doing so, he moves beyond a despairing portrayal of a fading mining town, offering a more insightful and multifaceted view of a city in constant transformation. In this way, Hobbs not only documents the city’s evolution but also challenges us to rethink how we engage with urban spaces, highlighting the humanity that endures amidst the unpredictability.
