Where does belonging reside when lineage is scattered across continents, oceans, and generational silences? In The Domain of the Stranger, her landmark solo debut at Perrotin in Paris, British painter Emma Prempeh (b. 1996) confronts this question not by forging a tidy narrative of homecoming, but by honoring the unresolved spaces between geographies.
Curated by Brice Arsène Yonkeu, the exhibition takes its title from a poignant line in scholar Saidiya Hartman’s seminal memoir Lose Your Mother (2007). Drawing together her Ghanaian fatherland, her mother’s Vincentian heritage, and her own working-class upbringing in London, Prempeh constructs a metaphysical triangulation.
Her canvases act simultaneously as containers and conduits—sites where memory, architecture, and personal myth collapse into haunting visual form.
The Physics of Aging: Schlag Metal as Temporal Material
Prempeh’s technical signature relies on the deliberate manipulation of fleeting materials. Across her often-monumental canvases, she applies schlag metal—a brass alloy composed of copper and zinc that mimics classic gold leaf.
Unlike traditional gilding, which promises eternal brilliance, schlag metal actively oxidizes when exposed to oxygen and light. As the alloy reacts over time, it darkens, tarnishes, and mutates across the painted surface.
This material instability serves a profound conceptual purpose. In Is this, Legacy? (2026), Prempeh depicts a half-built house in Obuasi, Ghana, that has waited twenty years beneath an unfinished roof, its facade marked with a bleeding red stop-work order.
By applying schlag metal to the storm clouds hovering above its fragile foundation, Prempeh ensures that the artwork itself will continue to age, shift, and decay alongside the physical structure in Obuasi.
Glissant’s Opacity and the Refusal to Explain
Throughout the exhibition, Prempeh resists the imperative to make the diasporic experience digestible or fully transparent to the viewer’s gaze. Instead, her work channels Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of “the right to opacity”—the radical idea that an individual or culture possesses an inherent right to remain unmeasured, withholding total exposure while maintaining dignity.
In the diptych Split (2026), Prempeh presents her father caught mid-smile, yet his facial details are partially erased and obscured by metallic veils.
This refusal of clarity extends to Return was, and still may be, an intention (2026)—a title borrowed from writer Dionne Brand. Depicting a small group clad in white passing beneath a “Door of Return” archway, the composition leaves it unresolved whether the figures have arrived or remain perpetually on the threshold.
Magical Realism: Transplanting Crystal Palace to Ashanti Soil
Prempeh’s practice reaches its most audacious peak when she abandons strict documentation in favor of architectural invention, borrowing concepts of hauntology—a term Mark Fisher adapted from Jacques Derrida to describe how unfulfilled futures continue to haunt the present.
In Crystal Palace School (2026), the landmark broadcasting tower standing in South London rises directly behind the flooded grounds of an elementary school in Obuasi—a school her father named after the very London Park Prempeh played in as a child.
By physically grafting a British architectural monument onto West African soil, Prempeh achieves what only a true magical realist can: she transforms a transplanted invention into an authentic memory.
The Unopened Door
Accompanied by a trajectory that includes studies at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art, alongside acquisitions by Tate and the Government Art Collection, Prempeh’s debut at Perrotin solidifies her standing as an exceptional voice in contemporary figurative painting.
The Domain of the Stranger offers no neat resolutions or simple answers regarding identity. For anyone who has navigated the floating terrain of global migration, Prempeh offers something far more liberating than a fixed destination: she paints the open doorway, leaving the threshold illuminated for us to inhabit.