LONDON.- Tiwani Contemporary is very pleased to presenting 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 valorisation of labour.

Chioma Ebinama (US/NI) is based in Athens, Greece. She engages with animist mythologies and non-western philosophies, and conceptualises her interpretations as drawn and watercolour 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-scaled 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 centres 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 labour to find value anew (Sweet Mother, Mama Ibadan) (2022) honouring the dexterity and labour 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.

Chioma Ebinama




Recent solo exhibitions include: Tipota, Fortnight Institute, New York (2022); A Spiral Shell, Maureen Paley, London (2022), lay all your love on me, Salon 94, New York (2021); mud & butterflies, Catinca Tabacaru, Bucharest (2021); Now I only believe in...love, Fortnight Institute in New York (2020); Leave the thorns and take the rose, The Breeder Gallery, Athens (2020); Anunu: Notes on the Divine Feminine, Boys’ Quarters Project Space, Port Harcourt, Nigeria (2019). Selected group shows include Never Done: The Serpent’s Eye, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, Rochechouart, France (2021); 100 Years of Women in Politics and Beyond, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York (2021); Nine Lives, Fortnight Institute, New York (2021); Animal Kingdom, Ame Nue, Hamburg, Germany (2021); This Point is Exactly Midway Between Two Other Points, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, New York (2021); Alien Landscape, 303 Gallery, New York (2020); Ambra Nera, The Breeder, Athens (2020). Chioma Ebinama is represented by Catinca Tabacaru Gallery in collaboration with Fortnight Institute, New York and Maureen Paley, London.

Miranda Forrester

Recent exhibitions include: At Peace, Gillian Jason Gallery, London (2021); Small is Beautiful, Flowers Gallery, London (2021); Reality Check, Guts Gallery, London (group - 2021); Poetic Sustenance, Tiwani Contemporary, London (2021); Abode, Guts Gallery, London (2020). Other shows in 2020: Every Woman Biennial, Copeland Gallery, London; Top 100 (The Auction Collective), London; When s**t hits the fan again, Guts Gallery (online); Miranda Forrester & Emily Moore, Phoenix Brighton; Narrating Life, Studi0 gallery, St Moritz, Switzerland; Pending, San Mei Gallery, London; Antisocial Isolation, Saatchi Gallery, London; Begin Again, Guts Gallery, Online exhibition raising funds for The Free Black Uni; FBA Futures, Mall Galleries, London. In 2019: PLOP End of residency show, The Koppel Project; Mercurial Matters: The Organic Feminine, Lock-in Gallery, Hove; How did we get here - Decolonising the Curriculum, Brighton University, Brighton. Represented by Tiwani Contemporary. Miranda Forrester is represented by Tiwani Contemporary.

Temitayo Ogunbiyi

Recent exhibitions and projects include: Refuge, 2021 Lagos Biennale, Lagos (group - 2021); Self-Addressed, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (group - 2021); 1:54 London, 31 Project (group - 2021); Taste!, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Victoria Island Lagos (group - 2021); Artorama, Marseilles, Paris (group - 2021); Imaginaires Émancipé, Manifesta, Lyon Paris (group - 2021); Stop, Listen! CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden (group - 2021); Giocherai nel quotidiano, correndo, Madre Museum, Naples, Italy (solo - 2020); Art Paris, 31 Project (group - 2020); Cape Town Art Fair, 31 Project (group - 2020); 2nd Lagos Biennial, Lagos, Nigeria (group - 2019); Women on Aeroplanes, TOR Art Space, Frankfurt, Germany (group - 2019); Capillarité, 31Project, Paris (solo 2020); You will find peace and play among palm trees, Freedom Park Playground, Lagos, Nigeria (solo - 2018); Strange Attractors (a curatorial publication created as part of the 10th Berlin Biennale), Berlin Biennale 10, Berlin, Germany (group - 2018); Talisman in the Age of Difference (curated by Yinka Shonibare), Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, England (group - 2018); Gallery of Small Things (curated by Bisi Silva), Dakar, Senegal (group - 2018); Women on Aeroplanes, Lagos Edition, Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, Nigeria (group - 2018). In 2018, she is a recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

Nengi Omuku

Recent solo exhibitions include: Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London and Berlin (2020-2021); Stages of Collapse, September Gray, Atlanta (2017); A State of Mind, Omenka Gallery, Lagos (2015). Recent group exhibitions include What Lies Beneath: Women, Politics, Textiles, New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge, UK (2022); Self-Addressed, curated by Kehinde Wiley at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Ubuntu, World Trade Organisation Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland (2021); The Invincible Hands, Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Lagos, Nigeria (2021); À Corps Défendant, La Galerie, Contemporary art Center, Noisy-le-Sec, France (2021); Dancing in Dark Times, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, UK (2021); Hospital Rooms, Griffin Gallery, London, UK (2018). Nengi Omuku is represented by Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.

Charmaine Watkiss

Recent exhibitions include Drawing attention: emerging British artists, The British Museum, London (2022); Womxn Of Colour Art Award 2020-2021 Exhibition: Altitude, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London (2022); The Seed Keepers, Tiwani Contemporary, London (2021); RA Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2021); To the Edge of Time, KU Leuven Libraries, Belgium (2021); Breakfast Under The Tree, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate (2021); Me, Myself and I, Collyer Bristow Gallery (2020); Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (2019), Wimbledon College of Art MA Degree Show (2018); Against Static (Curated by Tania Kovats), Wimbledon Space (2018). Charmaine Watkiss is represented by Tiwani Contemporary.