Thembeka Heidi Sincuba, Kwa Machi III, 2024

Thembeka Heidi Sincuba, The Dance of Death, 2024

Umngqwambo

Thembeka Heidi Sincuba

Front Gallery: 16.01.25 - 27.02.25

Umngqwambo conjures the remnants of initiation rituals and pedagogies that once framed the cycles of life in pre-colonial societies. The term in isiZulu can refer to communal gatherings or ceremonies that mark transformative life transitions such as coming of age, marriage, or spiritual calling. These rites of passage, now largely displaced by the machinery of colonial modernity, are revisited in this exhibition as sites of tension, memory, and possibility. Through oil painting, installation, and video, the exhibition traverses the thresholds between tradition and transformation, self and collective, body and spirit, all while interrogating the visceral experience of time, movement, and transition.

In a 16 November 2020 journal entry penned during their time ephehlweni (sangoma initiation school), the artist wrote, “Each day is a mountain,” capturing the escalating difficulty and, at times, tortuous conditions of intwaso (initiation). Often, Sincuba grappled with the desire to leave and return to the comforts of modern life, recording numerous such resolutions in these entries. Yet, it was the enduring promise of umngqwambo that anchored them, offering a beacon of hope amidst the trials. Having now undergone the ritual—equally notorious and shrouded in secrecy—the artist no longer regards it as a culmination, but rather as a threshold: a deliberate relinquishment of the familiar for the boundless possibilities of the unknown.

At the forefront of the exhibition are two large-scale oil paintings, The Dance of Death and Bahlekisa Ngami, painted from vivid memories, visions, dreams and nightmares, resulting from the equally traumatic and orgasmic rituals. These paintings engage the fluidity and volatility of time as a force both rhythmic and ruptured. They evoke a somatic response to the ceaseless motion of history—its spirals, disruptions, and returns—while gesturing toward the transitory nature of existence and collective identity. Their hectic surfaces and dynamic composition capture the corporeal struggle of navigating a world defined by flux, loss, and renewal.

The Amanzi Angcwele installation occupies a central position within the exhibition, infusing the intimate space with an aura of reverence. Water, with its profound simplicity and universality, holds a pivotal place in African indigenous cultures, embodying the duality of cleansing the old self while serving as a conduit to embrace transformation and renewal. On the other hand,  plastic connects itself to the generative and the destructive—tethered to learned vernacular traditions of displaced meaning-making. The video work, Procession, constructed from a blend of archival footage and recordings captured during the initiation process, seeks to materialise the elusive and almost otherworldly nature of the experience—an ephemeral odyssey that seems to both linger and recede further into abstraction with the passage of time. 

Together, these elements form a transdisciplinary inquiry into initiation as a mode of both personal and collective transformation. It is important to emphasise that this is an inquiry, not a resolution. From a speculative and Afropessimist perspective, the exhibition interrogates the afterlives of colonial disruption: What does it mean to cross thresholds in a world defined by systemic erasure? How might initiation—whether as ritual, pedagogy, or resistance—serve as a reclamation of agency for those navigating fractured identities and histories?

The viewer is urged to resist applying concepts of noble savagery, primitivism or exoticism, though they are intertwined with the history of art. Rather, viewers are invited to engage critically with how culture and modernity continuously rub up against each other, creating a necessary continuum that catalyses the passage of time. Umngqwambo resists the nostalgia of unbroken traditions, instead embracing the liminal and fragmented as spaces of generative potential. It is an experiment in merging what happens in the ample ethers of the rural homelands of Kwa-Zulu Natal with the stingy parameters of the artist’s beloved white cube. Through its interplay of paint, installation, and video, it frames initiation as a process of confronting endings to create beginnings—a dance of death and life, vulnerability and defiance, extinction and becoming.

Thembeka Heidi Sincuba

Website: heidisincuba.com

Instagram handle: @heidisincuba