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. 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?
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Umngqwambo
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. 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?
