Tiwani Contemporary is delighted to inaugurate its 2026 London programme with Present, a group exhibition bringing together the work of Bunmi Agusto, Carla Gueye, Marcia Falcão, Miranda Forrester, Ugonna Hosten, and Sikelela Owen, and an In Focus solo presentation of 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, and mixed media, these 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 Bitch, 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 and 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.
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. Ideas of community, intimacy, and authenticity are central to Sikelela Owen’s practice.
