LONDON.- Tiwani Contemporary inaugurates its 2026 London programme with group and solo presentations across the gallery’s spaces at 24 Cork Street. The group exhibition Present occupies the main galleries and brings together the work of Bunmi Agusto, Carla Gueye, Márcia Falcão, Miranda Forrester, Ugonna Hosten, and Sikelela Owen.

Through painting, sculpture, and mixed media, these artists explore figuration as a vital, expressive language for addressing the complexities of being seen, remembered, and understood. The exhibition unfolds through a series of interwoven visual and conceptual threads that ask: what does it mean to be present—emotionally, politically, spiritually, and historically—and for whom does that presence become visible?

Across the exhibition, the represented body becomes both a site of narration and an instrument of inquiry. The artists use figurative imagery to frame intimate and collective stories, mapping experiences of belonging, displacement, intimacy, and resistance. Their works propose new relations and solidarities, imagining environments—whether real, psychological, or speculative—in which the figures they depict might thrive. These environments are not fixed but improvised, shaped by memory, desire, and the urgent need to locate oneself within a broader social world.

Together, these presentations trace how figuration becomes a powerful tool for navigating inner and collective worlds. Across new and recent works, personal mythologies, spiritual archetypes, and embodied histories converge, revealing how artists use visual storytelling to shape identity, negotiate belonging, and reimagine the self in relation to others.

From Bunmi Agusto we include: Birth of A Universe (2025), and The Ascension of Ó (2025). Both works reference the formation of Within⎯ Agusto's inner world interpreted as an allegoric visual epic of her consciousness and spiritual growth. Within is founded following the Yoruba customary tradition of naming a child on the 7th day following its birth. Agusto affirms both her human and primordial self Ó, who becomes the creator and supreme divinity of Within. Carla Gueye’s Sisters and I (2023) is an installation comprising a small formation of sculpted columns of wood, sisal, sand and lime. Alluding to the gatherings under palaver or baobab trees in rural African communities where discussions are convened, Gueye imagines a site of female empowerment and community.

We feature Márcia Falcão's panoramic canvas, Bitch, I'm Not Ophelia! (2024) and Passinho Bifurcado (2025) shown in the lower gallery, from her ongoing series Passinho that channels the intensity of lived experience through thick, gestural marks and earthy palettes. Falcão’s figures assert presence through texture and motion, foregrounding the resilience and vitality of the female body. Miranda Forrester’s often intimate and luminous paintings centre the visibility of Black queer women, defining the Black queer gaze as one of self-possession and being seen in community. Through transparency and fluid mark-making, Forrester opens a contemplative space for softness and connection. We include, Sunkissed (2025) and The Invitation (2025) shown in the lower gallery from her recent body of works exploring queer temporality and the element of water as a threshold and liminal space of possibility.

Ugonna Hosten takes us on a spiritual journey drawing from Igbo cosmology, depth psychology and alchemical processes. Her representation of a pilgrim guided by divine forces becomes a metaphor for transformation and transcendence, wholeness and self-realisation. We include the graphite drawings Emissaries of The Gods I & II (2024), and Vigil (2025). Sikelela Owen's figurative paintings foreground her family and friends. Simultaneously her compositions observe her present life but are suffused by nostalgia and memories of other family members and her own, recalling instances experienced in Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and America. We include two intimately scaled portraits, Sike (on mum, 1985) (2025), of the artist as a baby being held by her grandmother, and Eli (laying in the Babula) (2025), a portrait of her son Eli laid down, soundly sleeping against a vividly patterned cloth wrap. Both paintings are connected to kubereka, acts of care that the artist has been thinking about.