Early 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 the University of the Witwatersrand with a BAFA (Hons.) in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries from 1994 to 2000. He has co-directed the artist collaborative, The Trinity Session, The Gallery Premises at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre, from 2001 to 2008, and since 2004, has co-produced a number of urban and network focused projects with Marcus Neustetter under the collaborative name Hobbs/Neustetter UrbaNet.
Through a committed practice of urban investigation and experimentation, focused particularly on Johannesburg since 1994, Stephen Hobbs has sustained a dialogue with urban space through video, installation, curated projects and, more recently, photography and sculpture. Hobbs is fascinated with the social and political changes in the city. He is passionate about Johannesburg. The city, for him, is an Aleph[1]. He says “If people would just give the city a chance they would see how much potential it has.”
Hobbs’ held his debut solo exhibition at David Krut Projects in 2010 with Fool’s Gold, a multi-media exhibition in which Hobbs encourages the viewer to see the points in between the points by exposing the multi-faceted potential the city (Johannesburg) holds, beyond what is obvious to the naked eye.
Hobbs continues to work with David Krut Projects (DK Projects) and the David Krut Print Workshop, with his work featuring in group exhibitions, among others, both The Benediction of Shade (Cape Town, 2013) and The Benediction of Shade II (Johannesburg, 2014). Hobbs’ second solo exhibition with DK Projects, Permanent Culture, was held in February/March 2015 at DK Projects Cape Town. A planned multi-media video and light installation on the SAS Somerset at the V&A Waterfront during the Cape Town Art Fair did not materialise but the project was presented at the 2015 Johannesburg Art Fair. At the same time the Permanent Culture.2 exhibition was presented at David Krut Projects Parkwood.
[1] The Aleph is described, in a fictional short story By Jorge Luis Borges, as a point in space that contains more points. Anyone who gazes at it can see every angle of the universe simultaneously without distortion or overlapping.