The GSA Practice Lecture Series foregrounds critical reflections on the modes, methods, and ethos of contemporary architectural and creative practice.
Invited speakers are asked to articulate the frameworks through which their practices operate — addressing questions of structure, authorship, pedagogy, and importantly process. The series privileges reflection over representation, encouraging a deeper consideration of the conditions, challenges, and ambitions that shape architectural and broader cultural production today.
Practice Lecture Series | Stephen Hobbs
Date: Tuesday, 20 May 2025
Time: 18h00 – 19h00 SAST
For the past three decades, Hobbs’s practice has been underpinned by three core areas of interest: architecture and the built environment, art and war, and anatomy and the body. Johannesburg, his hometown, has served as a critical reference point for his artistic insights into the apartheid city turned African city, with a particular interest in the impact of defensive urban planning and architecture on the behavioural aspects of city and society.
Printmaking, model-making, video, and photography serve as foundations for large-scale installations and commissions, while simultaneously offering audiences access to a variety of editioned and serialised works. Much of this effort has been facilitated through close collaboration with David Krut Projects in South Africa and New York.
Hobbs holds a BAFA (Hons) degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, is a fellow of the Ampersand Foundation, co-director of the transdisciplinary artists’ collective The Trinity Session, and a visiting critic at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in South Africa and abroad, and has participated in residencies in North America, Europe, and Africa. His work can be found in public and private collections in South Africa, Europe, and the USA.
For the purposes of this presentation, Hobbs will include reflections on his art school training, and how his third-year painting major gave way to his interest in the phenomenological aspects of buildings and space, explored throughout his honours year — and how these early learnings helped align his transdisciplinary approach to urbanism and art-making.
www.stephenhobbs.net
www.thetrinitysession.com