Artist: Virginia Chihota

Tiwani Contemporary inaugurates its 2026 London programme with an In Focus solo presentation of selected works on paper by Virginia Chihota and Present, a group exhibition bringing together the work of Bunmi Agusto, Carla Gueye, Marcia Falcão, Miranda Forrester, Ugonna Hosten, and Sikelela Owen, staged across the gallery’s spaces at 24 Cork Street. Both exhibitions position figuration as a vital and expressive language for addressing what it means to be seen, remembered, and understood today.

On display in the viewing room is a presentation of selected works on paper made between 2015 and 2016 during her time living in Tunisia, Zimbabwe and Montenegro. In these unique serigraphic prints, Chihota charts her inner life as a shifting symbolic landscape marked by vulnerability, self-questioning, and moments of quiet transformation, reflecting states of introspection and emotional recalibration.

All you can have but not my soul/zvese mungawana kwete mweya wangu (2015), As you will because its sweet/sokudaro kwenyu nekuti zvinotapira (2015), and Here I am not for you/ndiri pano ndisina chekuita newe (2015) were made in Zimbabwe during a time of separation from her partner, Rainer. The artist and her young son at the time couldn’t travel back to Djerba, Tunisia because of a passport and visa issue, so decided to spend three months working in Zimbabwe with her extended family and connect to moments of her thinking about family.

The motif of strawberries lovingly recurs across these works in thought of Rainer and family life in Austria, where no matter the season, strawberries are always eaten. Testimony with empty hands/ndopupura ndisina chandakabatai, (2015), affirms that irrespective of temporary separations, adjusting to a different setup in Zimbabwe with their baby son Edgar, and trying to create a series, the work is a declaration to say, “I am here for you,” and is about self-awareness—searching and understanding oneself in this journey.

Fighting Self/Kuzvirwisa (2016) and Who Will Stand With Me in the House of Cooking/Ndiani achamira neni muimba yekugadzira chikafu? (2016) — were based on sketches that were conceived in Djerba and finalised in Montenegro. Fighting Self is about searching for identity, digging deep within, and trying to touch and understand conflict, and self-relevance. Who Will Stand With Me in the House of Cooking asks if the kitchen is only a place for making food, or a place of creativity, ideas and questioning.