Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons is a two-hander by British playwright Sam Steiner that now has an SA incarnation, an entertaining and poignant production featuring Jessie Diepeveen and Maxim du Toit under the direction of Henu Baden. Lemons tells the story of a couple who must navigate the introduction of a law restricting the number of words everyone can speak each day to 140. It’s a play with a political edge, showing how quickly fascism asserts itself in “democratic” societies.
But it’s primarily a play about love and language: about how words serve us and fail us, about how an unbridgeable gulf can develop between people even when we have thousands of words at our disposal, and about how we can still connect in the absence of adequate verbal expression.
I was reflecting on this at the opening event of ST2025, this year’s Stellenbosch Triennale, recalling theatre critic Arifa Akbar’s observation that “for some in our age of 24/7 online oversharing, more quietude might sound like a utopia rather than the dystopia it is in Lemons”. Indeed, we are awash in verbiage to match the audiovisual excess emanating from our smartphones.
Yet we also need words aplenty, as tools to build and as weapons to resist, as mechanisms for healing and understanding and pleasure. We need an abundance of words, a superfluity, to create and explain and fact-check; we have to defend language from its greatest abusers, whether they are in the White House or on a bot farm.
I felt this tension — the paradox of simultaneously wanting more words and fewer — as I strolled through Stellenbosch’s Oude Libertas precinct, where the beautiful and good of the arts scene had gathered to launch the Triennale under the theme “Ba’Zinzile: A Rehearsal for Breathing”. The focus was on the twin exhibitions “In the Current” and “On the Cusp”, showcasing artists at various stages of their careers, from “emerging” to “established”.
For this component of the programme, chief curator Khanyisile Mbongwa and her team invited artists from across the African continent (as well as Brazil, Colombia, Afghanistan and the US) to come to Stellenbosch and make something new, on-site, for ST2025. A lower-cost, eco-friendly concept, it has the additional virtue of emphasising provisionality; the artists are, according to the theme, “rehearsing”, experimenting, trying out the changes they might “aspire to enact in the real world”.
The invitation was also a challenge to respond to their immediate environment, observing the place with the fresh eyes of a visitor — even the South Africans who had not travelled quite as far to get to Stellenbosch. Some of the resulting installations engage with the locale explicitly, like Beninese artist Thierry Oussou’s “Politics of the Seed” and “Dream to be Back”, which draw attention not only to the sense-data of wine production but also to the labour (and by implication the economic inequality) that makes possible the viticultural delights of Stellenbosch.
Other pieces incorporate traditions from the artist’s own country (such as Helen Zeru, who dug graves and erected a tent to invoke the Ethiopian social practice of Eder, in which a community provides support for bereaved families) or depict more idiosyncratic personal histories (such as Zambian William Miko, whose “Flying Foot” charcoal drawings reinterpret his experience of having a leg amputated).
SA artists Manyaku Mashilo and Simphiwe Ndzube have constructed works that interrogate what we mean by “home”. Mashilo’s small kraal, echoing the circular communal cooking structure in the Limpopo village where she grew up, is decorated with images of her “foremothers” — women who worked on one another’s land and developed a circular economy of sharing and exchange. Ndzube’s wonky corrugated iron shack, executed in the colourful surrealist style he has made his own, stands out boldly against the surrounding landscape: a disjunction that marks “the precarity of the notion of home and, more specifically, the struggle for shelter and security”.
With a little digital help via QR codes linking to the artists’ statements, most of the installations speak for themselves. They are, you could say, concise in their materiality: a concision at odds with the introductory blurbs hanging outside the old cellar building where some of the pieces are exhibited.
As a wordsmith rather than a visual arts insider, I’m often impatient with the textual tissue paper in which fine art is wrapped. Once my word-salad detector is triggered — to mix metaphors — it’s hard to ignore the packaging and focus on the gift. And so it was with a touch of cynicism that I read the assembled artists being described as “a composition of cartographers threading the present ... expounding the interior of what time holds.... Sometimes they hold the tide at the seams as they attempt a steady flow of breath within fracture lines that sit as the wound of the water and the wound of the land.” Elsewhere, the artists were deemed to “move on a threshold forming a distinctive continuation of being”.
My first thought was: lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons, lemons.
But then I dwelled on those evocative phrases, the wound of the water and the wound of the land. Amid the loquaciousness, there was poetry. And there was a lesson for me to learn. Where there has been wounding, there must be healing.
In addition to being a curatorial superstar, Mbongwa is also a sangoma. Though a base level of scepticism is justified when it comes to the art world — the air kisses, the fashion, the money, the ever-present risk of pretentiousness — there is something happening at ST2025 that forces even the most jaded arts writer to put aside his assumptions; to listen, look, read and, yes, to breathe.
The role of ritual
Ernestine Deane is a “song medicine woman” whose embrace of her diverse lineages — Irish, Zulu, Indonesian, Khoi and San — has led her to forge an identity as a “ritual creator”. It was in this role that she performed a welcoming ceremony at the Stellenbosch Triennale launch event, which thus diverged from the canapés-and-cocktails formula usually applied on such occasions. Instead, Deane invited those in attendance to gather round her, forgetting about their finery and schmoozing and social media posting, and to ask gently for an ancestral blessing.
She brought into the gathering the memories of those who have been displaced and excluded, from the first peoples of the land to the slaves who were brought to the Cape, from people of colour whom colonialism and apartheid deemed subhuman to those who still, today, are disenfranchised across the country. And there is the wounded land itself. That is a lot of historical pain with which to confront high (contemporary art) society.
Is this merely the commodification of ritual — the inevitability that, however sincerely intended, such an act will merely be co-opted towards the interests of capital? In the art world, that often means a washing of hands, so that money can change hands: artists play nice with gallerists, dealers and buyers, regardless of political or ideological differences, and so the wheels turn.
Or is this kind of ceremony a necessary means to resolve an impasse? Maybe, just maybe, a solely rational and secular approach leaves one stuck in an analytical dead-end. Accepting the wordiness of reaching towards the spiritual and the cosmic, no less than the wordless breathing that seeks the same ends — perhaps this was what I needed, breaking away from my binary thinking about SA. Stuck in my own cynicism, all I could see were apparently irreconcilable opposites: black, social justice-orientated artists versus the white elitist symbol of Stellenbosch.
In An Epidemic of Loneliness, a short film by Dylan Valley produced for the Stellenbosch Centre for Critical and Creative Thought, clinical psychologist Shahieda Jansen affirms that rituals are “part of our immunity” against the contagion of alienation: “The more individualised a society becomes, the more neoliberal it becomes, the more disconnected. The greater the inequality, the more the loneliness.”
We need rituals, then, even when they seem a little contrived. Through them, like Deane’s welcoming ceremony — as through occasionally kooky-sounding curatorial statements — we can ease the pain of the past and integrate into something like a collective identity.
Uncomfortable conversations
Having received the blessing, or perhaps the forgiveness, of the souls who had come before us, attendees at the Triennale launch were free to wander the Oude Libertas grounds to discover what the artists had prepared. Out in the vineyards, Oussou’s guard hut installation jarred with the winelands aesthetic, a stark reminder that the region’s beauty cannot be separated from exploitation.
I struck up a conversation with an American visitor, who suggested that the contrast was comparable to “seeing a protest work installed in the high-end neighbourhoods of Beverley Hills”. On the one hand, this is precisely the kind of place where activist-artists would want to display their work, provoking and disrupting in the belly of the proverbial beast. On the other hand, you could argue that the setting causes the message to be diffused and defused.
It’s not a dilemma specific to SA, but it does raise the question: who benefits? Is subversive art being appropriated to serve the status quo, becoming sanitised and made palatable to those who would prefer that nothing changes?
The ST2025 team are determined that this should not be the case. As Mbongwa has previously asserted, what’s important is that black artists (and black audiences) take up the spaces from which they were previously excluded. Beyond racial transformation, there is also an urgent need to address the economic segregation that characterises all SA towns and cities — Stellenbosch more than most.
The Stellenbosch Outdoor Sculpture Trust (SOST) was founded by Andi Norton and France Beyers with the express intention of democratising art in the region, making both art and the spaces in which it is displayed more accessible to a wider public. The triennale is an extension of this vision, which is why “Community in Practice” is a core element alongside the exhibitions. An ambitious education programme includes various opportunities for school learners, as well as numerous talks and workshops to encourage broad participation.
Beyers puts it candidly: “Stellenbosch needs to change, we all know that. And it has been changing, slowly, for some time. The triennale is an opportunity to have those uncomfortable conversations and to look for new solutions.” One such conversation is staged in “From the Vault”, a split-site exhibition at the Rupert Museum and the Stellenbosch University Museum that takes a rigorous look at past institutional and private collection practices, putting works from these collections in dialogue with contemporary SA artists.
While the triennale thus encourages a critical looking-inward, Beyers adds that “our outlook is global”. Notably, alongside Remgro, Old Mutual, the National Arts Council and other names familiar to South Africans, sponsors and partners include the UK-based Outset Contemporary Art Fund and pan-African development financiers Afreximbank. ST2025 is by no means a parochial event, but instead situates itself confidently within the international arts circuit.
Global art market
To pursue this international perspective, I make a final stop on my triennale journey at Silverkloof Estate outside Stellenbosch to visit American art collectors and philanthropists Michael Silver and Stephanie Thomas, who are among the major ST2025 patrons.
Dividing their time between California and the Cape, Silver and Thomas have already built an impressive collection of African art — including a number of sculptural installations on the Silverkloof property — and they are working with local gallerists to expand in both contemporary and historical directions. “In terms of SA art specifically,” Silver tells me, “our ultimate aim is to have a collection that offers a survey of the last 100 years or so.”
This leads to a conversation about exceptionalism and the tendency that the SA art ecosystem has shown in the past towards viewing itself as distinct from the rest of the continent. While there has been a move away from this in recent years, with SA art fairs, auctioneers, gallerists and events like the Stellenbosch Triennale positioning themselves squarely within the “African art rising” narrative, the residue of exceptionalism (perhaps echoing our country’s persistent anti-African xenophobia) remains.
I put it to Silver and Thomas — who are also members of the advisory council at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art — is there something distinct about SA, as opposed to African, art?
“No,” asserts Silver, “but what SA does have is an institutional infrastructure that makes it uniquely positioned to give artists from across the continent access to the international art market. That’s crucial. The global art world is still largely bound to the academic underpinnings of Western art, to ways of seeing and talking about art within a certain intellectual framework. So art produced in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda or Uganda becomes filtered through a Western paradigm, doing a disservice to the artists.”
SA’s art sector offers an alternative to this misrepresentation. “It wasn’t so long ago that African art was still viewed in the US and Europe within the category of ‘craft’ or touristic curios,” Silver notes. “This still happens to some degree today. Even though Picasso was stealing ideas from African artistic traditions over a century ago!”
There is another established model at play, Silver reminds me: “There are places where art is made and there are places where art is sold.” In the context of the US, when Silver was developing his artistic enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s, this meant that artists he followed lived and worked in the Midwest but they became famous in New York City and Los Angeles.
Prompted by this American point of reference, I mention the likening of Stellenbosch to Beverly Hills. Silver isn’t persuaded, responding instead with another advantage SA boasts: “Everyone in the art world here is much nicer. I mean it! In places like LA, New York, London, things are unfriendly by design. There are more barriers. You can’t just meet with artists and learn about their work as you can here. That intimacy is very valuable.”
Our conversation ends on a pragmatic note. “We have to get the art world to move from A to B,” says Silver, with the destination being “a more equitable global art market” — one that African artists can access more readily and that, in turn, benefits the arts across the continent. “SA can help to achieve that. I’m constantly inspired by the expertise and the can-do attitude of the fine art people here.”
After trying my best to be sceptical about the Stellenbosch Triennale, I find I can only agree.
• ST2025 is on until April 30.
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