Prem Sahib: Chamber

This autumn, we present a mid-career survey of work by British artist Prem Sahib, a chance to look back on twenty years of one of the most original and quietly powerful practices in British art today.

Prem Sahib (b. 1982, lives and works in London) makes art about bodies and buildings, about the way the spaces we move through shape how we feel, how we behave, and whether we belong. He works with materials like glass, neon, rubber, and aluminium to create environments charged with the memory of human presence. His work asks: who gets to feel at home in a space, and who is made to feel like an outsider?

Rather than moving through his career in order, the exhibition arranges works from across different periods so that they can speak to one another. Sahib has always made work that responds closely to the space it is shown in, and the De La Warr Pavilion, with its open, light-filled modernist design, both suits his work and quietly pushes back against it.

Fox (2004) is an eight-minute video. A table is laid with food and flowers on a dark lawn at night. The camera waits. Eventually a fox arrives, moving calmly among the plates. The work creates a sense of invitation, and then fills the scene with a creature that is neither quite guest nor intruder.

The Exit series (2014) are panels of aluminium and resin, each built up by hand with tiny droplets that look like beads of sweat or condensation. Up close, what first seems almost black reveals itself to be alive with small marks, traces of heat and bodies. These works reference the sauna, a space that has historically been important to queer social life: protective and intimate, but also precarious and contested.

The Horizon series (2026) are small acrylic panels, each filled individually by the artist with paint in a slightly different shade. Arranged together, they read from a distance like a pixelated screen, a single horizon line, a band of light above and darkness below. Installed at the Pavilion, the series sits in quiet conversation with the real sea horizon visible through the building’s famous floor-to-ceiling windows.

what you need to know to get rid of these blood sucking parasites (in the form of a whisper) (2023) fills a room with amber street light, the colour of underpasses and city spaces where queer people have historically had to find ways to exist. Dead leaves and a ground-level lamp evoke a nocturnal gathering spot brought indoors.

This exhibition is shown alongside Gordon Matta-Clark: Discrete Violations in the First Floor Gallery. Where Matta-Clark physically cut through buildings to expose what lay hidden inside them, Sahib works on and within architectural surfaces, exploring the way space already shapes behaviour before any artist intervenes. Together, the two exhibitions ask how buildings carry and pass on social meaning.

Prem Sahib: Chamber is supported by The Bridget Riley Art Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and Prem Sahib Supporters Circle.