A Walk in the City was Sandile Radebe’s inaugural solo exhibition, held in October 2014 at the National School of the Arts in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Situated on a ridge between the inner city and the northern suburbs, the school’s circular gallery—an iconic structure with panoramic views—offered the perfect spatial and conceptual frame for Radebe’s immersive installation.
The exhibition transformed the gallery into an abstracted urban maze, evoking the artist’s embodied experience of navigating Johannesburg’s dynamic streetscape. Drawing inspiration from the textures and rhythms of informal trade, taxi ranks, and architectural density, Radebe reimagined graffiti as sculptural form. By abstracting graffiti tags into three-dimensional structures that replace traditional alphabetic legibility, he invited viewers to consider graffiti as a spatial language and a visual architecture of resistance and presence.
At the core of the installation stood a tower composed of reconceptualised graffiti tags—a speculative model for a public sculpture. This central work anchored the gallery’s flow, while the surrounding structures offered shifting perspectives and moments of reflection, mirroring the disorientation and discovery of urban exploration.
An adjoining space displayed two-dimensional works that extended the show’s central themes. A Walk in the City asked viewers to engage language and space differently—where the line between the city ‘out there’ and the gallery ‘in here’ was blurred through creative navigation and spatial play.
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