At its centre is the story of UMbulumakheqe, a man who exists between worlds: between places, lineages and forms of belonging, and in search of a woman who exists in a world far from his own. The journey continues from the first exhibition, opening further into the people, places, encounters and forces that shape his path.

The duality embedded within his journey also exists within the artists themselves. Ande, born of a Xhosa mother and Zulu father and one half of a set of twins, has long explored the experience of existing across multiple worlds through visual storytelling. Mbali carries the story of UMbulumakheqe through voice. Their paths converge because the worlds they had been expressing independently were already speaking to one another.

Through this convergence, the auditory story and the visual scenes become inseparable. Painting, sound and oral narration move into one another, extending the story beyond a single medium. The horned and animal-like figures that populate Ande’s visual world become part of this shared language, carrying ideas of lineage, transformation, memory and the coexistence of seemingly opposing worlds.

UMbulumakheqe II continues this convergence through an exhibition that asks what happens when a story traditionally carried by voice enters the space of the visual, and when images begin to speak back. It is an encounter with inherited knowledge, ancestral presence, love, longing, loss and journey – a world where multiple lineages and forms of expression meet and become something larger than any one of them.

Here, storytelling does not remain confined to night. It moves into the gallery, into sound and image, and continues across the boundaries between past and present, the spoken and the seen, the individual and the collective.