LONDON.- Tiwani Contemporary is featuring 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.

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.

Recent exhibitions include: Conversations, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (group - 2024); Wandering Under A Shifting Sun, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (solo - 2024); In the Blood, Tiwani Contemporary, London UK (group - 2024); Where Dreams are Born and Peace Restored, Bwo Art Gallery, Douala, Cameroon (group - 2024); In Presence and Absence, Ordovas Gallery, London, UK (solo - 2023); Free The Wind, The Spirit And The Sun, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London UK (group - 2023); With Tenderness, Tiwani Contemporary, London, UK (group - 2023); You were, you are, and you always will be, Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos Nigeria (solo - 2022); In and Out of Time, Ada\contemporary Art Gallery, Accra Ghana (solo - 2021); Raise Your Glass, The Lightbox Gallery and Museum, Woking UK (solo - 2020); The Faces of Love, V.O Curations Post Residency Solo Show, London UK (solo - 2020) ; On Love, Home by Ronan Mckenzie, London UK (group - 2022); Friends and Family, Pi Artworks, London (group - 2022); At Peace, Gillian Jason Gallery, London UK (group - 2021); Mother of Mankind, Ada \ Contemporary Gallery X Hofa Gallery, London UK (group - 2021); Onward and Upward-Art in The Garden of Life, Droog Gallery, Amsterdam the Netherlands (group - 2020); Redressing the Balance #woman Artists, The Lightbox, Woking UK(group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London UK (group - 2020); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds UK (group - 2019).