Visual arts: Sonstraal
15 October 2025
Stellenbosch University Museum
Sunlight presses through woven plastic bags, scattering patches of colour throughout the room. The room is noisy; footsteps creak on the old wooden flooring and camera shutters interrupt conversations on the artworks as people walk across the room.
Selected as the 2025 Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees festival artists, Ben Stanwix and Xhanti Zwelendaba built an environment from texture, light, and rhythm. Sonstraal, on show at the Stellenbosch University Museum, uses everyday materials to question how South Africans relate to land, its use, its ownership, and memory.
Walking into the upper-level gallery, the light is the first thing that catches your eye. It filters through five large windows covered in woven produce bags, the kind used to package fruit and vegetables. The translucent yellow, purple, red, green, and white bags tint the room, transforming the space into what mimics stained glass windows at a church or cathedral.
Sonstraal, an exhibition of work by Ben Stanwix and Xhanti Zwelendaba at the Stellenbosch University Museum for the 2025 Toyota Stellenbosch Woordfees, brings about questions of land, land use, landscapes, and historical legacies in South Africa. PHOTO: Kyla Laing
The effect gestures towards the exhibition’s title, Sonstraal (‘Sunbeam’), but is also a symbol of Christianity and missionary work. The light becomes a metaphor and a critique to remind us how religion had been used to control and comfort in colonial South Africa.
In the centre of the room is an atrium, overlooking the museum’s lower floor, which the artists have ringed with a metal railing that resembles the outline of a reservoir.
It serves as an image of containment, relating back to topics of land claims. By turning a structural void into a focal point, the art invites a reflection on the politics of agriculture in South Africa.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is four large optical illusion tapestries. Pieced together from discarded fabric scraps sourced from stores in Woodstock, they transform throwaway remnants into complex colours and forms.
Co-curator of the Sonstraal exhibition, Shona van der Merwe, talking about the tapestry CASA 212, a Spanish military aeroplane used by the Bophuthatswana military. The image recreates a postage stamp from 1990. PHOTO: Kyla Laing
Up close, the eye catches the hundreds of colours and textures stitched together, and, when stepping back, an image emerges: A ship, a military plane, an olive branch, or prickly pears. Symbols drawn from postage stamps between the 1820s and 1990s. But it is only when viewed through a phone screen that the image is clarified completely.
The intricate medium adds a new layer. In South Africa, where textiles and crafts have long been feminised, Stanwix and Zwelendaba disrupt the tradition with their collaboration that reclaims male authorship.
Sonstraal is an exhibition about seeing, looking at how histories are layered, and only when light shifts does understanding come.
Ben Stanwix and Xhanti Zwelendaba gathered fabric cut-offs from stores in Woodstock to create large optical illusion tapestries. PHOTO: Kyla Laing
- Sonstraal can be seen until 19 October 2025 at the Stellenbosch University Museum. Entry is free.