Joburg’s dance and rebirth in perfect praise

Robin Rhode makes a welcome return to his hometown of Jozi with a blockbuster exhibition across two major gallery venues simultaneously. Though this is not the first time the two galleries have collaborated, it’s a first in Johannesburg for a solo exhibition. Rhode’s work does not disappoint.

From a curatorial point of view the exhibition — titled Joburg Hymn — is fairly straightforward, showing video and animated works in the unusual elliptical space of Everard Read’s Circa gallery. Prints and drawings related to these lens-based works are on show in the nearby Stevenson gallery space.

Rhode has been resident in Berlin for years, working from an extensive studio space there, but Joburg urban life remains central to his practice. In this body of work Joburg is front and centre, as the artist’s approach to the city as a canvas on which to work matures and deepens.

The collection of photographs, paintings and videos presents different reflections on the idea of Joburg as a palimpsest, as a series of redrawn and reinscribed surfaces, each containing the meanings of all the images and texts that are written and drawn over as a way to think through the city’s character and history. In keeping with the show’s title, this view of Joburg is in the mode of an homage, but Rhode doesn’t shy away from the fear and decay that permeates Joburg’s current identity.

As he puts it, ‘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 SA. 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?’

In the animation and photographic series Jacaranda Vignettes, his most recent work, one of Joburg’s most recognisable natural phenomena, the titular purple blooming trees, overlays Rhode’s doppelgänger figures against a wall that he has been engaging with in his art for years. The tone of homage to the city is palpable, yet in other animations such as Stage 15 and Padel, created in disused sports grounds in the West Rand, a less flattering but no less poignant view of Joburg’s decay is evident.

A central work of the exhibition encapsulates this ambivalence about the city as subject. Portrait with Keys references the 2008 novel by Ivan Vladislavić, Joburg’s picaresque novelist and unofficial poet laureate. The work depicts a figure against a wall navigating a landscape of keys, each of which takes on an all-too-familiar role in the litany of South African and Joburg security requirements. The piece is accompanied by a series of charcoal drawings of each key — to a cash box, a Trellidor, a security gate.

The eventual geometry of the array of keys surrounding the figure in the animation becomes a comment on the locked-down nature of the city itself, drawn against a rich yet decaying backdrop. The haunting soundtrack to this work is composed by South African piano prodigy Qden Blaauw, a recent and prominent collaborator with Rhode.

Rhode’s passion for Joburg shines through, even as the surfaces the city provides the artist crumble and erase. The dance, and the rebirth he is able to provide to the old city, are as important as they have ever been to its imagination.

• Joburg Hymn is on at Everard Read Circa and Stevenson galleries until October 18.