Rowan Smith is an artist, educator and musician who currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. He completed his BA in Fine Art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2007 and received his MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 2012.

Smith’s artistic output takes the form of a multidisciplinary semiotic investigation into the ways in which cultural signs and signifiers can be read as artefacts. He examines how the meaning embedded in these artefacts fluctuates (and frequently deteriorates) in relation to ever-shifting sociopolitical contexts; often assuming a self-critical position which responds to his locality.

In 2020 Smith started the collaborative sonic project Dead Symbols together with Fernando Damon and Vusumzi Nkomo. An ongoing project that situates it’s practice at the intersection of sound and theory; it is an inquiry, or study, into the sonic properties of theory, or sound as a theoretical intervention. The group’s work draws from the vast pool of Black critical theory to make sense of the World and contemporary society; it’s attendant order of knowledge and relations of power.