Stellenbosch Triennale 2020
We are starting here, from the place that has seen us bloom and perish. We start in the South, the corner, and from here we will expand. We start here with and without, displaced and disposed – we look towards the horizon and we see Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us.
As direct extensions of history, we are remembering – through the ancestral awakening – that exhumes the ancient on a global level. We experience our imagination as a sharpened tool in our state of becoming. Our grandmother’s technology becomes the compass.
So, in the newness of things, we acknowledge Africans as the first modernist through the Transatlantic Slave Route. It is here we imagine. As borders are tightening, deep migration lines etch the Mediterranean – some will mark the sea with their bodies, some will arrive as immigrant amongst other things.
In the litany of survival, being here is not a theoretical problem but an everyday lived experience. Artists and curators use the creative space as their weapon and arsenal to change what must be our common future.
The remembering, is the act of tracing memory. The ancestral, is the act of cultural recovery, the inheritance and familial. The spiritual, is the act of connecting and positioning of oneself through soulful alignment. The imagination, is the act of forming new ideas and concepts not present to the senses. The becoming, is the act of enabling radicalized desire thus creating new individuations and affections.
And as Gloria Anzaldía reminds us, “nothing happens in the real world unless it happens in the image of our heads”.
Curatorial Statement
Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us
ST2020 | From The Vault
From the Vault exhumes archives and engages with buried museum collections as a critical resource to contextualise and map contemporary society and culture. It concerns itself with exhuming work that has long gathered dust in museum memory, bringing these works to the surface as an unravelling of history, an undoing of narratives.
The exhibition represents a critical engagement with time by browsing through historical acquisitions, examining their significance as fragments of the past and showing how museum vaults can be…
ST2020 | Curators' Exhibition
When emancipation is professed, we may seem to have been at journeys for so long that we become complacent with the paths we traverse. To speak of tomorrow when yesterday is to be birthed today, to propose fixity when flux is the stuff of life.
And the songs of praise, too early to be fully formed, fall from lips that cannot fathom the depths from which to evoke tribute, not when we say, but why we say what we say…
ST2020 | Concepts of Freedom: Video Art Exhibition
African storytellers, if their craft is to have value, need to re-text the narrative process and their engagement with the perspectives offered by a deliberate exploration of ‘other’ and ‘self’. How we navigate conceptions of freedom in motion picture need to be dictated by an inherent ‘knowing’; of history, of connections to ancestry and of rich cultural contexts.
The work in this exhibition and film festival responds to the shifting landscape of visual engagement. With our interrupted history in frame,…
ST2020 | On the Cusp
An exhibition of artworks by 10 young African artists, On the Cusp is about revealing and unraveling the creative talents of tomorrow. Focused on graduating visual art students and young art practitioners who have pushed their creative boundaries and sit on the cusp of beauty and magic through their aesthetic, conceptual, critical, material choice, form or installation methods. On The Cusp is a point of transition between two different states; a pointed curve where two ends meet; an intersection of…
ST2020 | Die Braak Pavilion
The inaugural Die Braak Pavilion is situated on the Braak, Stellenbosch’s town square. Ironically, the name means fallow land, a description often used in post-apocalyptic art and movies. If we do not care for our planet it eventually will become “Braak.” Echoing the triennial theme “Tomorrow there will be more of us”, the intervention invited participants to ultimately determine the aesthetic of the pavilion, just as our choices will determine the “tomorrow” of our planet.
The notion of ’embodied experience’, explained by architectural…
ST2020 | African AD - Music Intervention
“We Cannot Arrest The Sound”
Tracing sound and sonic scapes as archive and knowledge production is a way to engage with music and songs as a connection through time; a map holding old memories and future stories.
Through African AD we explore African sounds and dancing as a constant connection and conversation with the cosmos. We examine how movement breathes life into things, how it is a call to maintain an equilibrium between reverie and reality. If music is an…
Participating Artists
Exhibitions
Featured Artworks
Khanyisile Mbongwa
ST2020 + ST2025
Chief Curator
Khanyisile Mbongwa is the Chief Curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale, an independent curator, award-winning artist, and sociologist based in Cape Town. Her work focuses on public space, interdisciplinary practices, and unpacking socio-political, economic, and gender-queer complexities. In 2018, she completed a curatorial research residency at CAT in Germany, which led to the exhibition BLUEPRINT: Where There’s Nowhere To Go, Where Is Home?. Khanyisile is also Adjunct Curator for Performative Practices at Norval Foundation and Curatorial Advisor for Cape Town Carnival.
Bernard Akoi-Jackson
ST2020
Curator
Bernard Akoi-Jackson is a Curator for the Stellenbosch Triennale and a Ghanaian artist based in Tema, Accra, and Kumasi. His multidisciplinary, audience-engaging installations and performative "pseudo-rituals" have been featured in prominent exhibitions such as An Age of Our Own Making in Denmark, Material Effects at the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum in the USA, and WATA don PASS: Looking West in Lagos and Sweden. Bernard’s work has also been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and the Nubuke Foundation in Accra, Ghana.
Dr Mike Tigere Mavura
ST2020 + ST2025
Assistant Curator
Dr Mike Mavura is an independent art curator, cultural strategist, and educator with a PhD in Political Science. His multidisciplinary work spans curatorial projects like the Stellenbosch Triennale and education roles at institutions such as Rhodes University and the University of Bergen. He is currently developing Pamurove, a learning site in Zimbabwe where art and design intersect with ecology and agrarian practices, reflecting his dedication to thoughtful civic engagement and cultural education.
Pieter J. Mathews
ST2020
Pavilion Curator
Pieter J Mathews is the Event Architect for the Stellenbosch Triennale and principal of Mathews and Associates Architects, an award-winning firm in Pretoria. He curated the South African Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale and played a key role in the development of the Javett-UP Art Centre. Pieter holds a Master’s degree in curation and regularly serves as an external examiner at South African architecture schools. He has also published books on architectural theory and designed furniture for Southern Guild.
Jay Pather
ST2020
Curatorial Advisor
Jay Pather is the Curator of the Performance Art Festival for the Stellenbosch Triennale and a renowned South African curator and choreographer. Based in Cape Town, he directs the Institute for Creative Arts and curates both the Infecting the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival. Jay has curated internationally for events such as Afrovibes in the Netherlands and Bienal de las Artes in Madrid. A Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, he has also published Transgressions: Live Art in South Africa and contributed to works on urbanism and performance.
Curatorial Team
Gallery
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