Robin Rhode: Memory is the Weapon

South African artist Robin Rhode’s (born 1976) trademark material is the wall. Influenced by urban music culture, film, popular sports, youth culture and traditional South African storytelling, his works are created on public walls. Rhode’s concern is not with the finished visual statement left behind on the street, however, but the process itself. Consequently, in his visual short stories, he captures the overlap between drawing, performance and sculpture, step by step. With drawing as his starting point, Rhode develops increasingly complex photographic works, digital animations, performances, sculptures and works on paper, which comprise a balancing act between South African history, culture, signs and codes, and the abstract language of European American art history.

Alongside reproductions of the art itself, Memory Is the Weapon also contains an interview, an introductory essay and poems by South African authors to whom his work often refers.