There is a way of being that existed in the past, when praise songs, stories, chants and
fundamental truths about the human condition were shared after nightfall by the elders.
These stories, izinganekwane, were not meant to be told during the day. It was believed that
an elder who narrated them in daylight would grow horns. Storytelling therefore belonged
to the evening, carried from one generation to the next through voice, memory and
presence.

UMbulumakheqe II: Sound, Story, Image is the second half of a story that began with the
first UMbulumakheqe exhibition. Continuing the collaboration between visual artist Ande
Magoso and poet and storyteller Mbali Malimela, the exhibition expands the world
established in the first chapter, bringing the story further into visual art, oral storytelling and
sound.

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.