Virginia Chihota, (Zimbabwean, born 1983)

Raiding Your Own (Kurera Wako), 2014

Raiding Your Own (Kurera Wako), 2014
signed and dated 'Virginia Chihota 2014' (lower right)
drawing and screen print on paper
189 x 152.4cm (74 7/16 x 60in).

Provenance
Tiwani Contemporary, 2015.

Exhibited
London, Saatchi Gallery, Pangaea II: New Art From Africa and Latin America, 2015.
London, Tiwani Contemporary, Virginia Chihota: A Thorn in my Flesh (munzwa munyama yangu).

Literature
Pangaea II: New Art from Africa and Latin America, Published by Saatchi Gallery, London, 2015, p.66-67.

Chihota's work is deeply introspective. She uses a variety of media to express her experience of the world. Raiding Your Own (Kurera Wako) incorporates elements of drawing, painting and printmaking. Rich in colour and symbolism, the piece can be interpreted as a search for self. The theme of identity is one close to the artist's art. Born in Zimbabwe, Chihota also spent a brief period in Libya. She now divides her time between Tunisia, Zimbabwe and Austria. Her transitory lifestyle has caused her to question who she is and where she belongs. In an interview in 2015, she described this as one of the formative influences on her practice:

"My work is a reflection on the search for one's self (and the perenniality of the self) in changing circumstances. Displacement creates uncertainty but the imperative to survive and the continuity one manages to maintain despite changing conditions inspires me."

In this screenprint Chihota reflects on the experience of becoming a wife and mother, and her temporary relocation to Tripoli in 2012. She uses the placement of the figure to convey nuances of dislocation, isolation and loneliness, in particular the motif of the inverted body or head.

The nurture and safety associated with the womb seem antithetical to such aloneness, yet it is precisely because of this that they hold special significance for Chihota's reading and representation of isolation. Reflecting on the meaning behind her symbolic use of the womb, she has said that it is "an all-encompassing symbol for fertility, for a woman's gift for gestation and the creation of life, a woman's intuition and psychic abilities, and the subconscious...No one is excluded from being fruit of the womb and all that that encompasses. It yields to the human condition".