EMMA PREMPEH

Prempeh’s practice has long turned on questions of belonging, time, and inherited history, held across her Vincentian and Ghanaian lineages in different measures from one body of work to the next. This exhibition marks the first time these geographies sit alongside a third: the British landscape of her own upbringing in London, entering her painting for the first time. Within this triangulation, the artist also returns to her relationship with her father, a subject she had approached before and set aside due to emotional difficulty. What results is not a settling of these inheritances into any single account of home, but a widening: an exploration of diasporic subjecthood held in a metaphysical register, one that resists explanation and dwells instead in what cannot be fully named or resolved.

Somewhere in Obuasi, Ghana, stands a house that has waited twenty years to become what it was meant to be. In the painting Is this Legacy? (2026), Prempeh paints it as she found it: two storeys raised beneath an unfinished roof, a stop work notice bleeding red across its facade, its foundation repeated in the fragile ground underneath, as though the ground itself could not decide whether to hold the structure or let it go. Ochre carries the painting’s weight, the same ochre that colours the land around Obuasi, while gold schlag metal catches in the clouds above, a material that will darken and shift long after the canvas leaves her studio so that the work keeps ageing the way the house has aged, unfinished and still becoming. Her father stands at the painting’s edge in profile, his face given only partly to paint, the rest surrendered to metal. He is present, and he withholds himself, both at once. Édouard Glissant called this kind of withholding a right rather than a lack: the right to opacity, an irreducible singularity that need never dissolve into full view to be respected. In the diptych painting Split (2026), Prempeh grants her father a face, caught mid-smile, its details still interrupted by that same schlag. She grants herself only a shadowed back, turned from the room. It would be easy to read this as absence. It reads instead as the silence of a daughter, standing in a house that is meant to be a father’s legacy to his children, yet it is still in construction, just like her relationship with her father and the environment where the house sits.

Beyond her father, the question widens into something less answerable: what a land that is half her inheritance can become to a woman who has only begun, in her adult years, to materially engage with it. Hartman, tracing the same coastline, explores the African diaspora and the legacy of slavery. She named the position she occupied, a stranger whose domain is “an elusive elsewhere”, present everywhere and rooted nowhere. Prempeh’s position is not quite Hartman’s own but is enriched by it.

The painting Return was, and still may be, an intention (2026), its title carried whole from Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, paints a scene closer to pilgrimage than arrival, a small group in white passing beneath an archway marked “Door of Return”, gold caught in the leaves above them like something remembered rather than seen. Brand named that door a spiritual location as much as a physical one, a threshold where return remains an intention long after it has stopped being a possibility. From the viewer’s perspective, Prempeh does not resolve whether she has passed through it. In the Blue Savannah (2026), one of her more cinematic paintings, she turns to the other shore of her inheritance, a solitary figure facing an unnamed sea, its water carrying, as Glissant writes elsewhere, only a threadbare, distant trace of what was left behind. Here the ocean is not a backdrop but a passage; the same threshold her mother’s Vincentian history and her own London upbringing must also cross to reach her.

Prempeh has spoken of hauntology, a term Mark Fisher drew from Jacques Derrida to describe how a future once promised and never delivered continues to haunt the present, as a touchstone for this shift, and her paintings mostly hold that idea as atmosphere rather than argument. One gesture breaks from that restraint into something closer to a statement. In Crystal Palace School (2026), for instance, a landmark of Prempeh’s own childhood, the transmission tower that has stood in Crystal Palace Park since the palace itself burnt down in 1936, rises behind the flooded grounds of the school in Obuasi. The tower physically belongs to London. Here it stands in Ashanti soil, planted there by nothing but the artist’s own hand. It makes explicit what a large part of the exhibition only implies: two sites bound in name since her father first named his school after her childhood park, now made to share a single frame.

Across this exhibition, invention becomes Prempeh’s way of admitting she is never fully at home in either of her worlds. Rather than resolve that condition, she inserts what she carries of one place into the other so that the reconnection her practice reaches for is made by her own hand rather than by the accident of two places sharing a name. It is a particular trick, one only a magical realist can manage: making the transplanted feel native, the imagined feel remembered.

In One world for another (2026), this device takes its most pointed form. Prempeh places her father beside her fiancé inside a walled garden bordered by stone terracing invented rather than observed, closer to the Italian Terraces that still line Crystal Palace Park in London, the last fragment of the old palace to survive its 1936 fire. To paint that stone into Ghanaian soil is not documentation. It is imagination doing the work; the description cannot. Cedrus libani returns the exhibition to Crystal Palace itself, its cedar rendered in the same loosened, memory-soaked hand that has carried the whole exhibition, gold caught in its branches the way it catches in the clouds over Obuasi and in the imagined stone of that walled garden. Across these three paintings, tower, terrace, and tree, three skies answer each other over an ocean none of them name.

The Domain of the Stranger settles nothing, and this is its quiet argument. For a viewer who has spent a lifetime being asked where they are really from, there is a kind of grace in work that refuses the question outright, offering instead the resonance of a room stood in, a smile half seen, a sea that carries only a trace of what it once held. Prempeh does not paint a destination; she paints the doorway and leaves it open.

— Brice Arsène Yonkeu

Courtesy Perrotin