Tiwani Contemporary is delighted to inaugurate 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, Marcia 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.
In the viewing room, an In Focus presentation is dedicated to selected works on paper by Virginia Chihota, created between 2015 and 2016 during her time living in Montenegro. In these unique serigraphy prints, Chihota charts 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.
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 three works: Birth of A Universe (2025), Ó Built Us A World (2025) and The Ascension of Ó (2025) which collectively reference the causation and development of Within, Augusto's vivid inner world created by the divinity Ó, Agusto's alter-ego.
Introducing Carla Gueye, we present Sisters and I (2023), a monumental sculptural installation comprising four columns made from wood, sisal, sand and lime. Gueye imagines female interdependence and community much like the auspices of the Palaver trees found in many rural African communities where discussions are convened. Gueye's sensual connection to matter, becomes a metaphor for rebuilding cultural identities.
We include two works from Márcia Falcão for her debut show in London, the panoramic canvas, Bitch, I'm Not Ophelia! (2024) and Untitled (2025, shown in the lower gallery) and the mid-scale canvas from her ongoing series Passinho that channels the intensity of lived experience through thick, gestural marks and earthy palettes. Her expressive handling of paint, oil stick and charcoal, confronts the intersections of gender, race, and violence. Falcão’s figures assert presence through texture and motion, challenging fixed social identities and foregrounding the resilience and vitality of the female body.
Miranda Forrester’s intimate and luminous paintings centre the visibility of Black queer women. Her delicate, gestural style captures moments of tenderness, care and emotional expansiveness, 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.
Multidisciplinary artist Ugonna Hosten takes us on an spiritual journey drawing on Igbo cosmology, alchemy, and depth psychology. Her ongoing tale of her pilgrim guided by divine forces becomes a metaphor for transformation and transcendence. wholeness and self-realisation. Recent works on presentation include the graphite drawings Emissaries of The Gods I & II (2024), A Trace of Where I Knelt a portrait of her spirit guide Ebezina (2022), and Vigil (2025).
Sikelela Owen's gesturally loose, figurative paintings, foreground the individuals and communities that she is close to. Her compositions simultaneously manage to be observant of her present life yet, suffused by her nostalgia and memories of growing up and living with family members in Zimbabwe, Jamaica, and America. We include two intimately scaled portraits, Untitled [Sike] (2025), of the artist as a baby being held by her grandmother, and Untitled [Eli laying in Babue] (2025), her son Eli laid down, soundly sleeping against the vividly printed cloth wrap (mbereko, babue) that may have just held him closely to his grandmother or another relative's back. Both paintings are connected to acts of care, kubereka.
About the Artists
Bunmi Agusto (b.1999, Lagos Nigeria) is a world-builder (artist, writer, curator and art historian) focused on fantasy and magical storytelling. In her practice, she combines painting, drawing and printmaking to create vibrant compositions of a fantasy world she calls ‘Within’. Within is a paracosm in the artist’s mind that functions as a repository for all that she encounters in her waking life. The figures in her work are often family, friends and passersby pulled from reality and into her world as cross-reality migrants through their encounters with her. As a result, Within reflects her own interiority as she uses the otherworldly braided landscape as a site to explore psychology, cultural theory, spirituality and the evolution of selfhood through the lens of fantasy.
Carla Gueye (b.1997, Angoulême, France) reflects on the complexity of identities, emotional relationships, and the experiences shaped by encounters and tensions between different cultures. By opening herself to otherness, her art also reveals emotional, artistic, and socio-ecological dimensions. Through materials such as lime and clay, the artist does more than explore their physical properties—she constructs narratives that reconfigure cultural knowledge and imaginaries.
Her approach engages with themes like memory, the feminine figure, and processes of excavation and reclamation of partly confiscated narratives. Her work thus becomes a way of re-inscribing and understanding her own story. Manual labor—central to her poetics—establishes an intimate, almost domestic relationship with matter, a metaphor for the idea of construction in both its social and humanistic dimensions. In this way, her creations become sensitive spaces for dialogue and reflection around culture, identity, and the complex networks that shape human experience.
Marcia Falcão (b.1985, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) paints with assertive gestures and thick layers of paint, articulating connections between the body, pictorial matter, and social conflict. Her palette, dominated by earthy tones, emphasizes the texture of skin and captures the nuances of a broad chromatic and emotional spectrum, emphasised in the figures she portrays and her mark-making techniques, ranging between sharp, incisive strokes and careful touches of paint. In various ongoing and evolving series, the artist addresses gender issues in relation to racial violence and the female body, challenging fixed identities and norms through a process-driven exploration of pictorial space.
Miranda Forrester lives and works in London. Forrester explores the queer Black female gaze in painting. Her work addresses the invisibility of Black queer women in the western art historical cannon, seeking to explore the plurality of queerness and blackness with an honest and sensitive approach. Her gestural style hovers between drawing and painting in application. Delicate, tender, visualisations of Black queer women in spaces where they are the most expansive versions of themselves. Domestic life and intimacy are sparsely defined and painted, alluding to a life in the process and event of unfurling and defining itself, capturing intimate moments of warmth, tenderness and insularity.
Ugonna Hosten (b.1982 Lagos, Nigeria) lives and works in Kent,UK. She is a multi-disciplinary artist working across media encompassing collage, drawing, assemblage and printmaking.
Hosten’s work pulls from vast fields, including philosophy, mythology, depth psychology, alchemy and the ancient spiritual traditions of the Igbos. Hosten has continued to explore and develop a mythical tale of a female protagonist on a pilgrimage guided by a divine entity. She cites her work as “a process of broadening and deepening a felt sense of the transpersonal dimension, a journeying towards a horizon of self-discovery and becoming.”
Sikelela Owen RA (b. 1984, London, United Kingdom) lives and works in Essex and London. She received her BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (2006) and holds a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools, London (2012). Ideas of community, intimacy, and authenticity are central to Sikelela Owen’s practice.
