The Domain of the Stranger

For her debut solo exhibition at Perrotin in Paris, Emma Prempeh presents a new body of work under the title The Domain of the Stranger, drawn from a line in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007).

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 aging 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.

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.

Source: Perrotin’s website