000%
Manyaku Mashilo and Andile Dyalvane at the 2025 Stellenbosch Triennale
30 Jan 2025 (3 min) read
Work by artist Manyaku Mashilo and ceramicist Andile Dyalvane will feature in the upcoming Stellenbosch Triennale 2025 running from 19 February to 30 April 2025.
The Triennale, curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa, will be held across three locations and four different exhibitions: Oude Libertas will host the ‘In the Current’, ‘On the Cusp’ and ‘The Bioscope’ exhibitions, while the ‘From the Vault’ exhibitions will be split across two venues: Rupert Museum and the Stellenbosch University Museum.
The theme this year is ‘BA’ZINZILE: A REHEARSAL FOR BREATHING’. Mbongwa says: “Through this Triennale, we aim to map out pathways for Breathing by inviting artists to make works on-site in Stellenbosch that attend to breath and breathlessness thus entering a Rehearsal as Improvised people. BA’ZINZILE: A REHEARSAL FOR BREATHING invites you to explore these themes, engage in the practice of insistence and find stillness and sustained breath amidst chaos.”
EXHIBITIONS
For ‘In the Current’, artists from different parts of the continent and the world are invited, through their work, to explore, examine, interrogate, question, view and experience the present. An exhibition of artworks by young African artists, ‘On the Cusp’ is about revealing and unraveling the creative talents of tomorrow. This will focus 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. ‘From the Vault’ sits in conversation with the ‘In the Current’ and ‘On the Cusp’ exhibitions on a timeline that situates artistic practices between past, present and future. Lastly, ‘The Bioscope’ is a motion picture projector that transports us into worlds imagined, fantasised, mythologised, re-enacted, animated. Here we are recalling, remembering, retracing Bioscope as an archival space of nostalgia, play, curiosity, wonder and amazement.
WORKS
Andile Dyalvane will present a series of vessels and ritual tools collectively known as Uku’Qokelela (meaning ‘to collect and release energy with ritual tools’). “Uku’Qokelela Ritual Tools are the ingredients fundamental to celebrate through the breath of our receiving and giving bodies”, says Dyalvane.
Manyaku Mashilo will showcase an outdoor installation and mural painting, marking the artists first foray into this mode of making. Mashilo pays homage to the rounded, roofless structures built by the women in her rural Limpopo community, a space where most of the cooking of meals took place. Because only sisters, mothers and daughters were privy to this circular place, it became a sacred feminine space: not only one in which to cook, but also a place of shelter and a coming together of women. “My presented work tells this story: it is an evocation, an incantation of my matrilineal binding. It honours the circularity of all things, the sustaining power of our Foremothers – in both this world and the next”, explains Mashilo.