The Company She Keeps – Group Show

Tiwani Contemporary presents 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 Introspection I-IV (2022) an installation thatincorporates a 20ft long stencilled mural and a series of four paintings using oil, gloss and image transfer on canvas and 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) (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 riteceremoniously reminding what flora was taken.

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