Tiwani Contemporary is very pleased to present The Company She Keeps, a group show bringing together five artists who work internationally. Materially and collectively their works draw attention to intimacy, reparative approaches, and the valorization of labor.
Chioma Ebinama (US/NI) is based in Athens, Greece. She engages with animist mythologies and non-western philosophies and conceptualizes her interpretations as drawn and watercolor compositions on rag paper. The Company She Keeps will feature Ebinama’s suspended circular painting, the bride 2 (2022) inspired by a scene of matrimonial rite, as featured in Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic novel, Things Fall Apart. This will be presented with the audio piece, Prayer for when fear strikes at dawn (2022).
Miranda Forrester (UK) is based in London. Two large-scale works will be on show: the diptych, Give Me All of You (2021), and two selected works from Introspection I-IV (2022) an installation that incorporates a hand-painted mural and paintings using oil, gloss, and image transfer on transparent polycarbonate panels. The installation centers an abstracted interplay of domesticity and interiority, structured by the gazes and intimacies shared between women.
Temitayo Ogunbiyi (NI/US/JA) is a Lagos-based artist and curator interested in how commerce, architecture, history, and botanical cultures inform the interactions and gestures that inscribe public and private space. Working across the disciplines of painting, drawing, and sculpture, she presents, You will labor to find value anew (Sweet Mother, Mama Ibadan) (2022) honoring the dexterity and labor of women.
Nengi Omuku (NI) is based in Lagos. Omuku will present Candyscape (2022), which adapts her interests in the politico-cultural representations of the figurative body to comprehend the psychotherapeutic impact of landscape on the psyche. Continuing her signature use of silk Sanyan fabric, Candyscape is a large-scale oil painting that momentarily suggests a retreat for the body, to harness the restorative power of real and ideated landscapes
Charmaine Watkiss (UK) is based in London. Her suite of new drawings, Àse (2022) brings Watkiss’ matrilineal deities to Nigeria. These ‘plant warriors’ are the human and spiritual embodiment of medicinal plants and seeds dispersed to the new worlds from West Africa via the transatlantic trade between the 16th and 19th centuries. The deities’ journey is a custodial and reparative rite ceremoniously reminding what flora was taken.
This show started on this 28th May and runs until 13 August 2022 at Tiwani’s recently opened Lagos gallery at 13 Elsie Femi Pearse Street Victoria Island Lagos, Nigeria
Visit the Tiwani Contemporary website for further details
image: Charmaine Watkiss, Respecting the knowledge of the land, 2022, Graphite, pencil, watercolor, ink, and 22ct gold leaf on Claybord panel, 60 x 45 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.
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