Robert Rauschenberg: ROCI The exhibition connecting different cultures through art

Along with Nick Knight, esteemed writer and curator Ekow Eshun has provided a Curated Routes tour for London Gallery Weekend. Our favourite on his list? Robert Rauschenberg's exhibition ROCI at Thaddaeus Ropac.

Few people did collage like Robert Rauschenberg; a medium the artist singlehandedly propelled to great success throughout the 20th century. His insatiable desire to use any material available to communicate and teach through art led him to founding ROCI in 1984: a monumental cultural exchange programme rooted in fostering mutual understanding between different cultures via artistic expression.

For the first time since the project came to a natural end in 1991, works made for ROCI - which saw Rauschenberg realise a large-scale touring exhibition primarily in countries where access to contemporary Western art and freedom of artistic expression was limited or non-existent - have gone on show at London's Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, forming an exhibition that continues Rauschenberg's commitment in connecting countries and cultures through art. As a firm believer in the concept itself and subsequent exhibition, writer and curator Ekow Eshun has also added the show to his London Gallery Weekend Curated routes tour, introducing Rauschenberg's art to a new audience at a time when global connections are feeling more sparse by the hour.

In true Rauschenberg style, Thaddaeus Ropac's ROCI exhibition encompasses everything from his canvases to sculptures to cardboard works, his use of neon lights, photographs and even textiles. Oh, and the artist's earliest metal paintings will also be on show, too. Contextualised with archive materials, there's no doubt the work included offers an unprecedented overview of one of the most ambitious and wide-reaching artistic interchanges of the late-20th century that makes known Rauschenberg's own acute awareness of global tensions at the time.

Rauschenberg was important not least because he's rightfully gone down as one of the art world's 20th-century greats but because he believed in people. He believed in conversation through art as a way of bettering his own understanding and he believed in art as a force for positive social change. In 1986, he said in a statement: 'If the attitude of ROCI is going to work, we are dependent on a one-to-one contact with as many people as possible because the most dangerous weapon we have is a lack of understanding' - a belief underpinning the entirety of Thaddaeus Ropac's exhibition, one that chooses knowledge over ignorance.