The Search for Self
Virginia Chihota
Virginia Chihota’s deeply introspective practice unfolds as a search for self, belonging, and spiritual transformation. Working across screen-printing, drawing, and painting, she creates layered, dreamlike compositions in which figures emerge, dissolve, and reappear through fields of color, texture, and gesture.
Guided by intuition and what she describes as “a sustained act of listening,” Virginia’s works meditate on intimacy, kinship, faith, bereavement, motherhood, and the shifting emotional landscapes that shape the human experience.
Repetition plays a central role in Virginia’s practice; the act of revisiting the same image or gesture is a devotional process through which questions are carried, transformed, and answered. Her works often feel like layered rooms where dreams, memories, and fragments of life converge across the past, present, and future.
In this episode, Elodie sits down with Virginia to discuss her journey of becoming an artist, why art is, for her, about “a continuous search for self,” and the true value of art.
A conversation about intuition, creation as a spiritual act, and the role identity, place and transformation play in one’s work.
Virginia Chihota is a multi-disciplinary artist. She graduated with a certificate in Fine Art from the National Gallery B.A.T Visual Art Studios in 2004, followed by a diploma in Fine Art from Harare Polytechnic in 2006. She represented Zimbabwe at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 and was awarded the Prix Canson the same year. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Tate, and the Astrup Fearnley Collection.
“In the end, each time a work is finished, there’s this fulfillment within me that I have never gotten anywhere else.”
Show Notes
Alice by Amedeo Modigliani
Virginia’s exhibitions Kupinduka at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and Kutera Mutsara / Hearing Inner Lines at Nicola Vassell
Lotte De Beer’s 2021 adaptation of Aida at the Paris Opera