SONSTRAAL is the first museum exhibition by collaborators Ben Stanwix and Xhanti Zwelendaba, presented as the festival artists for the 2025 Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees. Stanwix and Zwelendaba met while completing degrees at the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2017, and have exhibited both independently and in collaboration since 2019. This exhibition brings together works that emerge from a shared interest in questions about land, land use, landscape, and the historical legacies that shape these aspects of South Africa’s contested modernity. Using common materials including woven produce bags, shade cloth, corrugated iron, fabric, grass mats, cowhide, and reclaimed flooring, the artists develop a visual language that connects rural life and an agricultural economy to ideas of state, religion, and nationhood. The work invites viewers beyond straightforward readings to engage ambiguity, conflicting meanings, and productive contradiction as central elements of the artists’ practice.

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The show title, SONSTRAAL (Sunbeam), refers to the light that pours through the gallery’s five large windows. The space is transformed by veiling these windows in brightly coloured woven bags typically used to package fruit and vegetables. As light filters through the mesh, the room is bathed in a shifting glow of purple, yellow, red and green, an effect which recalls church stained- glass windows. There are two additional religious references: an Afrikaans song sung at schools and churches – ‘Jesus roep my vir ‘n Sonstraal’ (Jesus calls me to be a sunbeam), and a paraphrased verse from the New Testament – ‘He causes his sun to rise on the righteous and the wicked’.

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Below the windows in the centre of the space a corrugated iron band encircles the atrium, replicating a farm reservoir or livestock drinking trough. It refers to the gathering of water and the commercialisation of agricultural land – acts that define ownership and power, and have profoundly shaped South Africa’s rural geography.

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Occupying the central space in the gallery, a 3.8-metre-high work depicts a waterfall printed on ikhukho – the woven reed mats traditionally used in domestic spaces across Southern Africa. The image references Bawa Falls in the Eastern Cape, a site known both for its beauty and for the mythical stories that surround it. Waterfalls have long been considered thresholds between the visible and invisible worlds: places of spiritual presence and reverence.

The artists trace these associations while also reflecting on how natural features serve as markers of territory – rivers, mountains, and valleys forming boundaries long before official maps. Over the image, a faint drafting grid is imposed, recalling the paper of surveyors and cartographers.

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In conversation with the ikhukho used in BAWA, the artists explore the coexistence of other natural materials – wood and cowhide. In isiKhumba and 3rd Corner House these materials are signifiers of domesticity, culture, and status. Parquet flooring in traditional European patterns (chevron and herringbone) is overlaid with Nguni cowhide, bringing together rural and urban registers. The alignment of the cowhide markings resembles monochrome satellite images of an approaching weather system, or aerial views of a desert landscape.

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Livestock herding in Southern Africa spans roughly 2000 years, with cattle as a central feature of family wealth and a source of political authority. TON 618 and Imozulu (meaning ‘weather’ or literally, ‘the condition of the sky’) combine patterned Nguni cowhides with the plastic ear tags used to identify animals and herds on commercial farms. These tags become waypoints or markers on an unknown map. Imozulu makes reference to black and white meteorological images, while TON 619 refers to one of the largest known black holes, linking celestial measurement to the weighing of cattle that underpins their market value.

 

(Excerpts from wall texts for SONSTRAAL, 2025)