Tiwani Contemporary is pleased to present Virginia Chihota and Felix Shumba in two new presentations at 24 Cork Street.

In the upper and lower galleries, we have Virginia Chihota: Munoonei kana makaditarisa nhai Mwari?/What do you see when you look at me ohh God?

Chihota inimitably visualises her inner world as an emotionally shifting, symbolic terrain—a reconnaissance marked by vigilance, self-questioning, and transformative resolution. These new works originate from a question that unexpectedly came to her, "what do you see when you look at me?". The recurring motif of a seat, specifically a stool, becomes the pedestal for the represented body (her own) in direct observation and conversation with the Divine. A series of gesturally restless, and physiologically awkward standing or seated positions figure clearly in Chihota's visual ruminations, acknowledging the reality of what's experienced as opposed to the reality of what might be seen by others.

Our first In focus introduction this year in the viewing room features Felix Shumba: For want of a horse, a button was lost. Shumba has created an installation of charcoal drawings influenced by the evidential and documentary values of photography, particularly referencing 19th century daguerreotype plates and the work of American photojournalist J. Ross Bauman's 1978 Pulitzer Prize winning sequence of photographs following the Grey's Scouts, a Rhodesian mounted infantry and their brutal treatment of suspected guerrillas as part of inland security activity. Featuring a dystopian fiction that imagines a time-traveling military corps, the Salt Corps agents, activating a revisitation and surveyance of British colonial-era Rhodesia, now the Republic of Zimbabwe, Shumba explores the settler-colonial perspective and proprietary pursuit to discover, conquer and extract from a landscape and people that remain deeply scarred by trauma.