Tiwani Contemporary is delighted to inaugurate its 2026 London programme with Present, a group exhibition bringing together the work of Bunmi Agusto, Carla Gueye, Márcia Falcão, Miranda Forrester, Ugonna Hosten, and Sikelela Owen, and an In Focus solo presentation with selected works on paper by Virginia Chihota, 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.
Through painting, sculpture, drawing and mixed media, the artists in Present explore presence as something emotional, political, spiritual, and historical. Across the exhibition, the body becomes both a site of narration and an instrument of inquiry, carrying stories of belonging, displacement, intimacy, and resistance. Figures emerge within environments that are imagined, psychological, or speculative spaces shaped by memory, desire, and the urgent need to locate oneself within a wider social world.
Rather than fixed settings, these environments remain fluid and improvised. They propose new forms of relation and solidarity, envisioning where and how the depicted figures might thrive. Together, the works suggest figuration as a way of navigating inner and collective worlds, where personal mythologies, spiritual archetypes, and embodied histories converge to shape identity and reimagine the self in relation to others.
Alongside Present, we also have on display in our viewing room an In Focus presentation of selected works on paper by Virginia Chihota, 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.
Bunmi Agusto contributes three works—Birth of A Universe (2025), Ó Built Us A World (2025) and The Ascension of Ó (2025)—that trace the creation and evolution of Within, the vivid fantasy world shaped by the divinity Ó, Agusto’s alter ego. Blending cosmology and autobiography, these paintings offer a layered meditation on causation, imagination, and selfhood, where figures drawn from everyday life become “cross-reality migrants” within the artist’s paracosm.
Introducing Carla Gueye, Sisters and I (2023) is presented as a monumental sculptural installation of four columns made from wood, sisal, sand, and lime. Drawing on the idea of the Palaver tree—a traditional gathering site in many African communities—Gueye imagines female interdependence and shared space. Her tactile, sensual engagement with materials becomes a metaphor for rebuilding cultural identities and restoring partly lost or silenced narratives.
Márcia Falcão is presented in her London debut with B##h, I’m Not Ophelia! (2024), a panoramic canvas, alongside Untitled (2025) in the lower gallery and a mid-scale painting from her ongoing Passinho series. Working with thick, gestural paint, oil stick, and charcoal, Falcão channels the intensity of lived experience through earthy palettes and forceful mark-making. Her figures assert their presence through texture and motion, confronting the intersections of gender, race, and violence while foregrounding the resilience and vitality of the female body.
Miranda Forrester’s intimate, luminous paintings centre the visibility of Black queer women. With a delicate, gestural approach that hovers between drawing and painting, her work captures moments of tenderness, care, and emotional expansiveness. Included here are Sunkissed (2025) and The Invitation (2025, lower gallery), from a recent body of work exploring queer temporality and water as a liminal threshold of possibility—a space where softness, connection, and self-possession can unfold.
Multidisciplinary artist Ugonna Hosten presents a constellation of recent works drawn from her ongoing spiritual narrative, including the graphite drawings Emissaries of The Gods I & II (2024), A Trace of Where I Knelt (2022), a portrait of her spirit guide Ebezena, and Vigil (2025). Rooted in Igbo cosmology, alchemy, and depth psychology, Hosten’s evolving tale of a pilgrim guided by divine forces becomes a metaphor for transformation, wholeness, and self-realisation.
Sikelela Owen’s loosely gestural figurative paintings foreground the people and communities closest to her, infused with memories of growing up and living in Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and the United States. Two intimately scaled portraits are shown: Untitled [Sike] (2025), depicting the artist as a baby held by her grandmother, and Untitled [Eli laying in Babue] (2025), of her son sleeping against a vividly printed cloth wrap. Both works centre acts of care and kubereka, linking intimacy to lineage, memory, and belonging.
Virginia Chihota’s serigraphic works chart her inner life as a shifting, symbolic landscape marked by experiences, self-questioning, vulnerability, and moments of quiet transformation, reflecting states of introspection and emotional recalibration.
