Ever since the 1960s, groups of idealistic South Africans have periodically banded together to stage ambitious group exhibitions informed by the prevailing zeitgeist and framed by a promise of regular return. Yet if there is a common thread to defunct biennial and triennial expositions like Art South Africa Today (1963–75), Cape Town Triennial (1982–91), Johannesburg Biennale (1995–97), and Cape Biennale (2007–09), it is their brief nature and anemic legacy: their methods and achievements have largely been forgotten. One consequence of this weak transmission of history is that exhibitions like the newly launched Stellenbosch Triennale, a patchy but ultimately engaging project staged at various venues an hour’s drive northeast from Cape Town, end up seeming unique and even daring, particularly in an ecology dominated, over the last decade, by art fairs. Commercialism has come to define the current zeitgeist, but that is not what makes this large-scale exhibition so of the moment. At a press conference launching the main curated exhibition, a confident showcase of twenty African artists overseen by curators Khanyisile Mbongwa and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, various speakers highlighted what curatorial advisor Jay Pather summarized as Stellenbosch’s “deeply problematic context.” A former intellectual redoubt for apartheid ideologues and bolt-hole for plutocrats …