Tiwani Contemporary is proud to feature the first of two solo presentations (the second in Lagos early 2025) by Emma Prempeh where pictorially she considers for the first time, landscape, and its relevance as an expansion of her hyperreal perceptions of home, belonging and memory. Her paintings depict events, people, interiors, places and still life from past and recent memories, emphasizing and representing the passing of time and the instability of memory. On occasion, Prempeh includes projected still or moving imagery, to invite experiential and performative encounters with her work.
Wandering Under a Shifting Sun accounts for recent shifts in Prempeh's personal life as she divides her time between London and Kampala, Uganda. Her experience of living between continents and developing new kinships and extended family, has overlapped with more established familial conversations around belonging in relation to her grandmother and mother's memories of St. Vincent in the Eastern Caribbean, and their subsequent migrations to London; and her Ghanaian father and the aspirations he has for the plot of land that he owns in West Africa. Pertinently, the artist's growing consciousness around decolonial and indigenous activism around land rights, and her migrant status as a newcomer to Uganda, has begun to expose greater nuance and complexity of her diasporan subjecthood. Wandering Under A Shifting Sun invites us to observe Prempeh's poetics of relation, manifest as a visual magic realist interpretation of the events and vistas shaping her life in this new series of paintings and installation.
On Saturday 12 October, 3-5pm, join us for an exhibition walkthrough and conversation between artist Emma Prempeh and artist/curator Michael McMillan.
Emma Prempeh lives and works in London. She studied at Goldsmiths University of London graduating in 2019 winning the Alumno/Space bursary award for 2020. She recently attended MA Painting at the Royal College of Art under the LeverHulme Trust Arts Scholarship winning the Valerie Beston Trust Arts award for 2022.
The starting point to Prempeh’s paintings is the matter of blackness – the tonal properties of the colour establishes the ground to her paintings and a cinematic basis to invoke and project memories of events, people, and places to emphasise an appreciation of ancestral time and relationships, selfhood and transformation. Schlag metal, a brass alloy of copper and zinc imitative of gold leaf, is a material that Prempeh applies to selected areas of her often large-scale paintings. Over time this oxidises creating slow, live visual changes that animate the image and create a meta-narrative around our experiences of the passing of time, memory and its representation. Prempeh occasionally experiments with projected still and moving imagery to create painting installations that invite other experiential and performative encounters with her work.
