SEVILLE.- “I was born into the conditions of a restless spirit, with the obligation to dream awake.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1913–1935, published in 1982)
“I was born with a scream.”
Dambudzo Marechera, The House of Hunger (1978)
In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa renders existence as a state of suspension, where identity splinters and certainty drift out of reach. His words pulse with unease yet also with clarity: the awareness that incompleteness forms the very condition of being. This atmosphere of disquiet, not as paralysis but as vital force, provides a resonant framework for the work of Virginia Chihota (1983, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe).
In her first solo institutional exhibition, Kupinduka, presented at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC, Sevilla), Chihota brings together paintings, drawings, prints, and large-scale works on paper, including a new series shown for the first time. Her practice is profoundly introspective, shaped by every day and transformative experiences: motherhood and kinship, loss and displacement, memory and faith.
Chihota fuses painting, drawing and screen-printing into intricate layers of pattern, colour, and line. The female body, often her own, recurs as fragment and silhouette, dissolving into abstraction, multiplying across the surface, or folding inward as if in retreat. These figures carry vulnerability and endurance in equal measure, their fragile contours sheltering memory while opening toward transformation. At the core of her practice lies the notion of Kupinduka. In Shona (the main languages of Zimbabwe), the word suggests a turning, a shift of state, often understood as moving into the spiritual realm to carry a message. It is not merely change, but a passage, a rupture in which the self-unsettles, transforms, and speaks from another register. In Chihota’s work, this act of turning becomes visible in the way her figures fold, double, or dissolve; in the way lines repeat like echoes; in the way absence itself becomes a presence on the page. Her drawings and prints do not present the body as fixed or whole, but as a site of continuous passage, charged with the possibility of conveying something beyond the visible. Kupinduka, in this sense, gives her visual language both its fragility and its force: an art of threshold, where the intimate body becomes a messenger of the unseen.
The new works reveal a heightened delicacy: translucent lines, vegetal motifs, and spiritual signs that drift between interiority and transcendence. Here the body is not a stable form but a shifting terrain, generative and open, where silence becomes rhythm and instability gives rise to renewal. Pessoa wrote: “To exist is to drift between what I dreamed and what I lived.” Chihota’s practice inhabits precisely this drift. Her figures oscillate between protection and openness, silence and rhythm, disappearance and return. They embody the sense that life unfolds in motion, suspended between inner vision and lived experience.
If Pessoa lends the echo of metaphysical unease, Dambudzo Marechera (1952–1987, Rusape, Zimbabwe), Zimbabwe’s incendiary poet and novelist, shadows her work with the urgency of fracture and survival. Marechera’s writing confronts dislocation, exile, and the volatility of identity with a raw intensity that refuses containment. His declaration that “to write is to burn and to emerge as ash” resonates with the way Chihota’s forms seem to dissolve only to reconstitute themselves, fragile yet insistent. Where Marechera’s words tear open the fabric of belonging, Chihota’s images mend and unmake simultaneously, balancing fracture with tenderness, refusal with hope.
Chihota’s universe ultimately turns restlessness into vision. Her paintings and works on paper are not depictions but meditations, where pigment and line open into states of passage. At their heart is Kupinduka: the turning through which the body unsettles itself, crosses thresholds, and speaks in new forms. Figures emerge and retreat, bodies collapse into pattern, colour trembles against absence. She builds a visual language in which fragility is not a weakness but a source of renewal. What is incomplete becomes fertile ground, what is fractured becomes a path toward imagining otherwise. In this sense, Chihota’s work invites us to see painting as both shelter and threshold, a place where the body enacts its own turning, dreaming of what it might yet become.
Dr. Jimena Blázquez Abascal
Virginia Chihota (b.1983, Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe), currently lives and works in New York, USA. Her deeply introspective work is shaped by both landmark and everyday personal experiences. She reflects on themes of intimacy, kinship, bereavement, faith and transformation. Chihota’s distinctive approach blends screen-printing with drawing and painterly gestures, creating unique works marked by striking complexity. The female form often emerges in her work, blending into near abstraction, and her iconography highlights female agency challenging borders. Her art emphasises subjectivity as an interconnected concept, where individuals, communities and the environment are bound together.
Chihota graduated in Fine Arts from the National Art Gallery Studios in Harare, Zimbabwe in 2006. She 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.
Selected exhibitions include: Virginia Chihota: A visit to the other, Museums Zutphen, Zutphen, Netherlands (solo exhibition at Museum Henriette Polak; commission and group exhibition at Dat Bolwerck, 2025); 35th Ljubljana Biennale, Ljubljana, Slovenia (group - 2023); The Norval Sovereign African Art Prize Finalists Exhibition, Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (group - 2022); Uri Mwana Wani? (Whose Child Are you?), National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (solo - 2019); Virginia Chihota, ULUCG Artists’ Pavilion, Montenegro (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).
Virginia Chihota is among others, in the collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Tate, London, UK; Fondation H, Antananarivo, Madagascar; FRAC Picardie, Amiens, France; The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, Zimbabwe; The U.S. Department of State, USA; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, USA; and CCS Bard College Museum, NY, USA.
