LONDON.- Tiwani Contemporary opened their 2023 London exhibition programme with gallery artist Virginia Chihota's series, Chibereko Chakaramba Kuudzirwa (The Womb Refused To Be Told), 2022.
Made in the same year as the series Nharo Dzakanyarara (A Quiet Resistance), currently on show in the group exhibition, I See You at Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos, this body of work contemplates the nature of acts of refusal and resistance that come into play in protection of selfhood, family and community.
These unique mural-eque serigraphic works are a palimpsest of drawn, printed and densely layered compositions. Weaving together the realms of her sub-consciousness and lived reality, the works express how one might find the spiritual energy to break damaging psychological cycles and instead create hopeful and generative ones to live and thrive by.
Introspective in nature, Virginia Chihota's work is deeply influenced by personal experiences - landmark and everyday. In a reflection on intimacy and the human figure, she has addressed themes such as childrearing, marriage, kinship, bereavement and faith. At once mundane and transcendental, rife with allusions to everyday life, and religious and folkloric symbolism, her large works on paper display a raw, expressionist verve and a striking grace in the elaborate use of patterns, textures and layers.
Having trained as a printmaker, Chihota’s use of screen-printing is as confident as it is original. She mixes printing techniques with drawing to produce unique works of striking formal complexity. They often depict the female form blending into near abstraction, and bodies caught in strange embraces evoking a figural union; along with an iconographic repertoire which points towards the domestic whilst emphasising connectedness and collectivity. Chihota's work highlights the ways in which the female agency disrupts borders and activates concerns around different forms of belonging. Subjectivity emerges as a concept embedded in notions of interrelatedness.
Virginia Chihota was born in 1983 in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe and currently lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She graduated in Fine Arts from the National Art Gallery Studios in Harare, Zimbabwe in 2006. Chihota represented Zimbabwe at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and was awarded the Prix Canson in the same year. In 2021, her works were commissioned by the Opéra National de Paris, France for Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida.
Recent exhibitions include: Chibereko Chakaramba Kuudzirwa (The Womb Refused To Be Told), Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (solo - 2022); I See You, Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos, Nigeria (group - 2022); The Norval Sovereign African Art Prize Finalists Exhibition, Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (group - 2022); Whose Am I? I Am Not My Own (Ndiri Waani? Handisi Muridi Wangu), Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (solo - 2021); Uri Mwana Wani? (Whose Child Are you?), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (solo - 2019); Virginia Chihota, ULUCG Artists’ Pavilion, Montenegro (solo - 2019); Mhamha, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (solo - 2019); Ultrasanity. On Madness, Sanitation, Antipsychiatry And Resistance, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany (group - 2019); Close: Drawn Portraits, The Drawing Room, London, UK (group - 2018); The E-qualities of Women, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe (group - 2018).
