Stellenbosch Triennale 2020
11 February 2020
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30 April 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
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Participating Artists
Exhibitions
Featured Artworks
Khanyisile Mbongwa
ST2020 + ST2025
Chief Curator
Khanyisile Mbongwa is a Cape Town-based curatorial theorist and sociologist who engages with her curatorial practice as Curing & Care, using the creative to instigate spaces for emancipatory practices, joy, play and Black Aliveness. Mbongwa is the founding Curator of the Stellenbosch Triennale, her other recent projects include: Inaugral curator of the Hazendal Festival 2024 Bele nje, Abathulanga; curator of Liverpool Biennial 2023 'uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things'; Curator of History’s Footnote: On Love & Freedom at Marres, House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, Netherlands 2021. Mbongwa is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Creative Arts, University of Cape Town and is a Blak C.O.R.E (Care of Radical Energy) Fellow at the University of Melbourne 2024-2025.
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 leads Pamurove Foundation, a land-based social practice in Domboshava, Zimbabwe, blending social sciences, indigenous knowledge, and popular culture to explore civics, spaces, and design. His work spans curatorial projects, ecological interventions, rural design, and university teaching. Mavura’s fellowships include Liverpool Biennial Curators’ Week (2023), TURN2 Residency at ZK/U Berlin (2021), and Lagos Biennale Residency (2019). He holds a PhD in Politics from Rhodes University and a certificate in Conservation Agriculture from the Foundations for Farming Institute. He serves on the Stellenbosch Outdoor Sculpture Trust and ZK/U Berlin’s Advisory Board.
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
Featured Artworks
Featured Artworks
Gallery
ST2025 is brought to you by Outset Contemporary Art Fund and many more
SPONSORS + PARTNERS
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