Strings of Representation

This digital exhibition explores uhadi, the Xhosa gourd bow, as both a musical instrument and a feminist archive of women's knowledge, agency, and cultural memory. Traditionally played, made, and safeguarded by women, uhadi carries intergenerational practices of sound, care, and storytelling that have shaped musical life within Xhosa communities for generations.

Historical ethnographic archives and colonial-era music histories have often marginalised both the instrument and the women who sustain its traditions. By contrast, this project centres uhadi as a living archive embedded in embodied practice. Through the acts of making, playing, and transmitting knowledge, the instrument becomes a site where memory, identity, and cultural continuity are actively preserved and reimagined.

Building on an earlier exhibition-workshop presented at Bayreuth University (2024-2025), where audiences witnessed the transformation of raw materials into living instruments, this project adapts the work into a digital format. A short film documents the making of uhadi from raw materials to performance. At the same time, a photographic series focuses on the hands that shape the instrument, cutting, bending, carving, and stringing the bow. These gestures foreground the tactile and embodied knowledge that sustains Indigenous musical traditions. The exhibition follows what can be understood as Umzila, the legacy, tracing the instrument's life from its material origins to sound. Through this multimodal work, uhadi emerges not only as a musical instrument but also as a material practice of memory and representation that amplifies women's voices and resists cultural erasure.