Stephen Hobbs
Short biography:
Early on in his career, Stephen Hobbs recognised the need to produce and publish across the disciplines of artistic production, curatorial practice and cultural management. He graduated from Wits University with a BAFA(Hons) in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (Johannesburg) from 1994 to 2000. Since 2001, he has co-directed the artist collaborative The Trinity Session, the Gallery Premises (closed 2008) at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre and since 2004 has coproduced a number of urban and network focused projects with Marcus Neustetter under the collaborative name Hobbs/Neustetter UrbaNet.
Living and working in Johannesburg, Hobbs views the city as “an African metropolis of perplexing contradictions and unpredictable developments in the social, urban environment.� Johannesburg was once the powerhouse of South African business, its Manhattan of glittering skyscrapers, but in recent decades corporations have moved into the suburbs to escape high crime rates. After Apartheid laws that forbade Blacks from living in the city were scrapped, many made the inner city their home. Today, Johannesburg no longer has the feeling of a policed White capital that it once had; it is clearly an African city. It stands as a powerful index of transformation – and is a site for innumerable transformative moments. Hobbs draws on urban vocabularies of images and signs to point to cities’ transformative qualities, which are often invisible and ineffable. He has worked with video, photography, and installation to “record� such “intersticial ensembles� as human interactions, meeting points, or merely the traces of sites of transformation in city environments. Hobbs has exhibited extensively in South Africa, Europe and the USA.