TOUR OF VIRGINIA CHIHOTA’S SOLO SHOW AT CROMWELL PLACE WITH TIWANI CONTEMPORARY DIRECTORS
Join us for a tour of Virginia Chihota’s solo show Chibereko Chakaramba Kuudzirwa (The Womb Refused To Be Told) at Cromwell Place with Tiwani Contemporary’s associate director Isabel Vegas.
The series emerges from an intense cycle of creative production for Chihota in which she has developed and birthed several bodies of work, each one contemplating the acts of refusal and resistance that come into play in protection of selfhood, family and community. Chibereko chakaramba Kuudzirwa (2022), centres on the realm of the womb, its intuition and capacity to support and yield life but also its deliverance of uncomfortable truths, including death.
Deeply personal, the series is drawn from periods of intense introspection while also reflecting the quotidian reality of maintaining a studio practice. Each individual work is rigorously completed and lived with by Chihota until the moment comes for it to be made ready to leave the studio, a situation which provokes a melancholic ‘empty nest’ emotional response in the artist.
Introspective in nature, Virginia Chihota’s practice is profoundly influenced by personal experiences and addresses themes such as childbearing, child rearing, marriage, kinship, and bereavement. Trained as a printmaker in Harare, Zimbabwe, Chihota’s use of screen-printing is as confident as it is original, mixing printing techniques with drawing to produce unique works of striking formal complexity. Chihota’s works often depicts the female form blending into near abstraction, highlighting the disruptive power of female agency.
These unique mural serigraphic works are a palimpsest of drawn, printed and densely layered compositions. Weaving together the realms of her subconscious and lived reality, the works express how one might find the spiritual energy to break damaging psychological cycles to create, instead, hopeful and generative ones to live and thrive by.
Image: Virginia Chihota, Chibereko chakaramba kuudzirwa (The womb refused to be told), Tiwani Contemporary, London, 17 January – 11 February 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.