Stellenbosch Triennale boasts three extensive exhibitions at multiple venues

The Stellenbosch Triennale returns to the Western Cape with three extensive exhibitions staged across multiple venues in and around central Stellenbosch — primarily on the Oude Libertas Estate, at the Rupert Museum and the Stellenbosch University Museum.

The three exhibitions, titled From the Vault, In the Current and On the Cusp, all fall under the rubric of the 2025 Triennale theme, “BA’ZINZILE: A Rehearsal for Breathing”, under the guidance of chief curator Khanyisile Mbongwa, assisted by Dr Mike Mavura.

In the curatorial statement, the theme indicated by the title “invites artists and audiences to explore breathing as both a fundamental physical act and a metaphor for resilience and survival”.

Launched in 2020, the Stellenbosch Triennale initially focused on sculpture, and particularly outdoor sculpture. The 2025 edition expands on that medium with painting, textile-based gallery work, film and installation added to the more straightforwardly sculptural artworks on display.

The festival is a collaboration between the nonprofit Stellenbosch Outdoor Sculpture Trust (SOST) and its supporter, the UK-based Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

The From the Vault exhibition is installed across the landmark Rupert Museum — long-term custodian of Pierneef’s famous Station Panels — and the Stellenbosch University Museum.

This part of the exhibition is intended to recontextualise archival museum works to establish new dialogues and meanings with the contemporary works in the exhibition.

In the case of the Rupert Museum show, the strategy puts a collection of abstract paintings by featured artist Kemang Wa Lehulere in dialogue with historical paintings from the collection. The different takes on the idea of land, living on the land and the conventions of landscape painting are questioned in the show, with the paintings intermingled.

Lehulere is better known as an evocative installation artist, often using everyday materials in a “ready-made” sculptural approach designed to question political power structures.

His paintings here are not only in dialogue with other landscape work from the collection’s archive, but also with a series of small sculptural works by Anton van Wouw, an established early modern Afrikaner sculptor whose work was sometimes commissioned by the Boer republics.

Elsewhere in the same show are ceramic works by world-renowned ceramicists and sculptors Andile Dyalvane (SA) and Sisonke Papu (SA).

The “In the current” section of the Triennale is a new addition meant to internationalise the thematic concerns and the artistic participation.

Artists in the section dominated by installation and sculptural work include Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe (Democratic Republic of Congo), Aline Motta (Brazil), Aziz Hazara (Afghanistan), Lebohang Kganye (SA), Simphiwe Ndzube (SA), Thierry Oussou (Benin), Torkwase Dyson (US) and William Miko (Zambia).

Kganye has an intriguing video work on the Triennale, titled A burden consumed in sips. Known primarily as a photographic artist, Kganye presents an accomplished and subtle live-action animation hybrid film.

It is inspired by images taken by the German painter and photographer Marie Pauline Thorbecke, who in 1911—1913 undertook an expedition to Cameroon for a publication by her husband, the geographer Franz Thorbecke, on behalf of the German Colonial Society.

In December 2022, Kganye set out on a trek across Cameroon, retracing the trail of the so-called Colonial Expedition of 1911 that the Thorbeckes had embarked on 110 years before. 

While the Thorbecke couple undertook the journey to appropriate objects and photograph people and the land for the purposes of imperial extraction, Kganye sets out to symbolically return the objects and images she encountered in the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum’s collections that she had studied during her residency in Cologne.

The luggage she carries along on the journey symbolises the burden of colonial heritage. The film is beautifully realised, wiping from animated drawing to live action in a panoramic sweep along one wall of the venue at Oude Libertas, which is reminiscent of a school hall.

Across from it, staged as a part of the emerging artist “On the Cusp” segment of the Triennale, is another video installation, Drexciya by Colombian/Chilean artist Astrid Gonzalez.

The video and an accompanying plant installation are an imaginative, speculative response to constructing an alternative reality in response to racist depredations and the colonial history of dispossession and slavery.

The video in particular imagines an undersea existence for slaves thrown overboard, an alternative society that has built an organic and spiritual place where human life is maintained in connection with other marine beings.

The plant installation is a place where healers heal patients, a kind of liminal zone where knowledge about medicinal plants speaks with knowledge about ceremonial and funeral songs.

These are just a small sample of the many works on show at the Triennale. It’s well-worth a visit and brings the South African art world more in line with other expansive ventures and museum-quality art festivals in the Global South.

It is a commendably ambitious and extensive festival which tends to be a little over-curated in the sense of works at times appearing to shoehorn into an overarching concept that is at once very broad and accommodating, and perhaps too multivalent to offer traction in the exhibitions themselves.