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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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Aaron Samuel Mulenga

Zambia

b. 1990

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Agnes Waruguru Njoroge

Kenya

b. 1994

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Bronwyn Katz

South Africa

B. 1993

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Denyse Gawu-Mensah

Ghana

Asafo Black Collective formed 2017

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Donna Kukama

South Africa

B. 1981

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Euridice Getulio Kala

Mozambique

B. 1987

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Hellen Nabukenya

Uganda

B. 1983

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Ibrahim Mahama

Ghana

B. 1987

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Igshaan Adams

South Africa

B. 1982

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Indira Mateta

Angola

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Jeffrey Otoo

Ghana

Asafo Black Collective formed 2017

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Kaloki Nyamai

Kenya

B. 1985

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Kelvin Haizel

Ghana

B. 1987

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Kivu Ruhorahoza

Rwanda

B. 1982

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Larry Adorkor (Bonchaka)

Ghana

Asafo Black Collective formed 2017

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Lazaro Samuel

Tanzania

b. 1998

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Malebona Maphutse

South Africa

b. 1994

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Mongezi Ncaphayi

South Africa

B. 1983

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Nástio Mosquito

Angola

B. 1981

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Patrick Bongoy

Democratic Republic of Congo

B. 1980

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Pieter J. Mathews

South Africa

1967

Die Braak Pavilion

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Reshma Chhiba

South Africa

B. 1983

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Ronald Muchatuta

Zimbabwe

B. 1984

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Rumanzi Canon Griffin

Uganda

b. 1991

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Samuel Baah Kortey (Kristo)

Ghana

Asafo Black Collective formed 2017

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Sethembile Msezane

South Africa

B. 1991

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Simnikiwe Buhlungu

South Africa

b. 1995

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Stacey Gillian Abe

Uganda

B. 1990

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Tracy Thompson

Ghana

B. 1993

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Valerie Fab-Uche

Nigeria

b. 1996

ST2020 On the Cusp

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Victor Ehikhamenor

Nigeria

B. 1970

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Wura-Natasha Ogunji

Nigeria & USA

B. 1970

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

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Zyma Amien

South Africa

B. 1962

ST2020 Curators' Exhibition

ST2020 | From The Vault
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
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
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
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
ST2020 | Die Braak Pavilion

Die Braak Pavilion 

Our life-giving armature


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 pavilion is a fusion between…

ST2020 | African AD - Music Intervention
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

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

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

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

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

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