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 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? 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. Works on show include Fox (2004), an eight-minute video where a fox arrives at a table laid with food and flowers on a dark lawn at night, creating a sense of invitation and filling the scene with a creature that is neither guest nor intruder. The Exit series (2014) are panels of aluminium and resin, referencing the sauna, a space important to queer social life. The Horizon series (2026) are small acrylic panels, each filled individually by the artist with paint in a slightly different shade, arranged together to read like a pixelated screen. 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, evoking a nocturnal gathering spot brought indoors. This exhibition is shown alongside Gordon Matta-Clark: Discrete Violations in the First Floor Gallery, asking how buildings carry and pass on social meaning. Prem Sahib: Chamber is supported by The Bridget Riley Art Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation, Phillida Reid and Prem Sahib Supporters Circle.