Artists: Virginia Chihota - Alicia Henry - Joy Labinjo - Wura-Natasha Ogunji - Dawit L. Petros - Umar Rashid (Frohawk Two Feathers) - Leo Robinson

Tiwani Contemporary launches its 2025/26 exhibition program with a group presentation featuring recent works by Virginia Chihota, Alicia Henry, Joy Labinjo, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Dawit L. Petros, Umar Rashid, and Leo Robinson.

The exhibition features recent works by the artists ahead of their upcoming solo and group presentations, and commissions of new work this year. A Conscious Relation: body/mind/movement invites viewers to consider sovereignty not just as a political condition but also as a deeply embodied experience. The matter of sovereignty relates to the ways in which their bodies, histories, and cultural narratives are both shaped by and resist dominant societal structures. Whether through the negotiation of identity, the reclamation of heritage, or the embodied experiences of movement and displacement, the works in this exhibition engage with sovereignty as a complex and multi-dimensional concept.

In celebration of artist Alicia Henry, who passed away in October 2024, the exhibition features her signature modular wall-based sculptures including Untitled (cluster), (2019) and Untitled (2019-2020), largely figurative formations, crafted from hand-embroidered, stitched, and dyed fabrics, sometimes leather, felt, linen, hessian, wood, and card elements. Henry’s work, which addresses identity, social relations, and kinship, is an essential part of the show’s dialogue about the complexities of belonging and personal autonomy.

Virginia Chihota’s Miganhu yodimbuka (Boundary lines have started breaking), 2022, is a large-scale serigraphic piece from The Womb Refused To Be Told series (2022), which engages with themes of spiritual and psychological resilience, featuring abstract representations of the artist’s own lived experience and subconscious world.

Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s practice examines the impact of motion and mobility on the body and psyche, with her 2023 painting, Keep Your Head In The Clouds reflecting on freedom of movement through minimalism and embodied performance.

Joy Labinjo’s Terra Firma I (2022), part of the Terra Firma series, marks her first exploration of self-portraiture. The work addresses the cultural significance of the Black female nude and Labinjo’s empowering assertion of autonomy through unapologetic depictions of her body in diverse, provocative poses.

Leo Robinson’s early painting, The Mortals (2016) is displayed alongside later works, The Singularity Portal Interior (2023) and Mineral Unconscious (2023), tracing his exploration of myth, ritual, and journey through figurative imagery

Umar Rashid’s painting, Blackness can’t live in three dimensions if it tried. Nero and the Harlem Knights enter the Equus Cosmica for real, this time (2022) animates a futuristic scene with a cohort reckoning with the interwoven realities of the past, future and present time.

Dawit L. Petros’ photographic work, Single Cube Formation No.2, Santa Barbara, CA (2011) the wall-sculpture Strategic Withdrawal, Central Sector, 1900, Number 3 (2023), interrogate the relationship between African histories and European modernism. Petros engages critically with colonial legacies, cartographic representations, and the geopolitical complexities of the Horn of Africa.