Emmanuel Asante
Emmanuel Asante is an emerging Ghanaian artist and photographer based in London. His practice is concerned with motion: in the physical sense of pace, rhythm and gesture and in the sense of what moves us, what holds or shifts something in a person the instant a frame is taken. Both are shaped by the forces, structures and traditions that generate or constrain them. Rather than starting from a fixed thesis, Asante builds his work image first, letting recurring structures (individual, collective, systemic) surface across repeated, differing examples of the same idea.

This throughline runs from Slow Motion No Motion, which held the pace of life in Ghana against the West, through the ongoing Motion Theory series: a study of inertia, turbulence and stasis that has grown into an interest in the body at its point of maximum exertion, its apex moment. The same instinct for the unrepeatable moment carries into his freelance documentation of events, culture and nightlife across London, where the intention stays the same regardless of the setting; not to cover, but to document. His most recent work was shown as part of Hidden 26 at the Royal College of Art, where he has built close connections within its photography community.

He is currently developing a new project on athletic movement in Ghana, across football, boxing, capoeira and polo. Ghana is where Asante is from and the pull to document there runs through all of his personal work, not simply as a subject he has chosen but as one he keeps returning to.