Ancestral Dance brings Lucky Sibiya’s Skotnes-inflected carved panels to a late, exuberant climax. As a young artist Sibiya famously arrived at Cecil Skotnes’s Polly Street studio with painted found objects and was taken on as a private pupil; from Skotnes he absorbed not only the technique of engraving into wood but the idea that African spiritual imagery could drive a modernist language rather than decorate it. By 1998, he had transformed that inheritance into something distinctly his own: richly incised, pigment-rubbed panels in which dance, initiation and divination are recast as complex abstracted choreographies. Here the carved, painted wood operates as both sculpture and painting, echoing altar screens or ritual doors while asserting itself as high modernist object. The subject – an ancestral celebration in full flight – speaks directly to the essence of this exhibition: Sibiya gives visual form to the way ceremony, trance and communal movement sustain Black life under and beyond apartheid, insisting that these are not “folk” remnants but sophisticated systems of knowledge. In this sense Ancestral Dance functions as a late-20th-century bridge between the Amadlozi generation and contemporary artists who continue to draw on African cosmologies in resolutely modern terms.