Dead Fishes and Praying Mantis is a collaborative multimedia project by Ghanaian-German artist Calvin Hein and Ghanaian photographer Kay Kwabia that explores questions of origin, identity, and belonging across Ghana and its diaspora. Bringing together two perspectives—one shaped by distance and one by proximity—the work investigates how cultural identity is experienced, remembered, and reconstructed across geographical and emotional boundaries.

The project developed from an ongoing dialogue between the artists, centered around a key question: how does “home” feel to someone who grew up within it, compared to someone who approaches it from afar? This exchange unfolds through a combination of photographic work produced in Ghana and Germany, a personal family archive, and an interview with Hein’s grandfather, whose life as a seafarer connects multiple continents and histories of movement.

The work operates through fragments rather than linear narrative. Intuitive image-making, shared authorship, and the exchange of visual material between the artists create a layered body of work that reflects the complexity of diasporic identity. Everyday scenes, textures, and gestures become carriers of memory and belonging, while archival documents anchor the work in lived histories.

The title Dead Fishes and Praying Mantis functions as a metaphor for the experience of navigating identity between cultures—oscillating between disconnection and observation, distance and intimacy. The project extends beyond photography into installation, incorporating fabric, sound, moving image, and printed matter to create an immersive environment.

By bringing together personal experience and collective narratives, the work opens a space for reflection on cultural continuity, transformation, and the emotional dimensions of diaspora. It invites viewers to reconsider fixed notions of identity and instead approach belonging as something fluid, relational, and constantly in motion.