Thembeka Heidi Sincuba’s forthcoming exhibition Umngqwambo at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town (16 January - 27 February 2025) presents a reimagining of African initiation rites and the interstitial spaces between memory, transformation, and the body. Through an evocative interplay of oil painting, installation, and video, Sincuba constructs a sensory landscape that interrogates the deep tensions between tradition and modernity, the individual and the collective, the sacred and the profane.
At the centre of the exhibition are two large scale oil paintings, The Dance of Death and Bahlekisa Ngami, which bear witness to the artist’s personal engagement with intwaso, the sacred and often grueling process of sangoma initiation. These visceral works do not merely depict a ritualized passage; they evoke the primal, somatic intensity of movement and time. The paintings, executed through Sincuba’s aggravating technique—bold, sensual, frenetic yet stubbornly linear brushstrokes—echoing the inherent violence and ecstasy of liminality.
A key element of Umngqwambo is the installation Amanzi Angcwele, where water, symbolizing purification and renewal, is juxtaposed with plastic, a material that embodies both artificiality and de(con)struction. The video Procession deepens this tension, merging archival footage with Sincuba’s personal documentation of initiation, exploring how particularly digital technology could reshape the liminal spaces of ritual.
Umngqwambo emerges as a speculative, transdisciplinary inquiry into the complex afterlives of ancient African customs and rites of passage. It proposes initiation not as an unbroken tradition, but as a space of rupture and reclamation—one that defies nostalgia and embraces the fragmented, future state as a site for radical transformation. Through the hybridization of media and material, the exhibition challenges the viewer to confront the paradox of endings and beginnings.
Visit Umngqwambo at AVA from 16 January. For more details, visit ava.co.za.
Thembeka Heidi Sincuba (they/them)
Thembeka Heidi Sincuba began their arts education at Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2005, earning a BFA from Artez Academy of Art in Arnhem, Netherlands in 2010 and an MFA from Goldsmiths University of London in 2014. Sincuba has served as an art and culture writer, contributor and/or editor at various publications including Art in Context, Mail &Guardian, Chimurenga, Bubblegum Club, ARAK Collection and Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI). They were the Head of Painting at Rhodes University from 2017 to 2019 and during this time, they also taught a course on spirituality in art as a Guest Lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Sincuba is vice chair on the board of SWEAT (Sex Workers Education and Advocacy T askforce), serving since January 2019. In 2021, they were the Artist in Residence at the Nordic Arts Association in Stockholm where they collaborated with renowned South African painter Lefifi Tladi, exploring Afro Abstraction and its connection to African spirituality. Sincuba’s most recent solo exhibition was at Galerie 23 in Amsterdam in October 2023, with a recent group show at Berman Contemporary in April 2024.
