Prem Sahib: Chamber

Prem Sahib makes sculptures, installations, paintings and sound works that explore how our bodies relate to the spaces around us. Their work often begins with familiar things: doors, clothing, heaters, street furniture and architectural surfaces. Removed from their usual settings, these objects can take on different meanings. Something designed to provide warmth might instead create distance; a source of light can alter how a room is perceived; an everyday object can become a marker of memory, desire or control.

Spanning more than twenty years of Sahib’s career, Chamber brings together works in which familiar materials and objects are altered, displaced or encountered in unexpected ways. Across the exhibition, surfaces reflect, conceal and reveal; objects direct our movement and attention; sound and temperature change how space is felt. Sahib is interested in the ways architecture can organise behaviour, but also in how spaces are transformed by the people who occupy them.

The exhibition’s title, Chamber, has many meanings. A chamber can be a room, an enclosed space, a legislative group, or a hollow within the body. It evokes intimate and private spaces, authority and law, sound and echo, and the anatomy of the heart. A chamber can contain or protect, but it can also amplify, restrict or change what passes through it.

Thresholds recur throughout the exhibition: between public and private, inside and outside, visibility and concealment, attraction and unease. In A Passing, doors and heaters from a former social space carry their material history into the gallery. In Kin, the roaming shadow of a stray moves through the exhibition, searching, hesitating and repeatedly changing its relation to the bodies around it.

Elsewhere, mirrors, screens, clothing, light and sound create different forms of encounter. Some works draw attention to the traces carried by objects and surfaces; others to anticipation, looking, waiting or the promise of somewhere beyond the present space.

As you move through Chamber, these works ask you to notice not only what is in front of you, but how you are positioned in relation to it: where you stand, what you can see, what you can hear and feel, and how the space around you shapes those experiences.

Prem Sahib (b. 1982) lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and internationally.

Solo exhibitions include: 2026 Kin, Phillida Reid, London, UK; Liquid Gold, The Perimeter, London, UK; 2025 Doubles, Pitzhanger Manor, London, UK; Documents of a recent past, Studio Voltaire, London, UK; 2024 Alleus, performance co-commissioned by the Roberts Institute of Art and Somerset House Studios, Somerset House, London, UK & Edinburgh Art Festival, Edinburgh, UK; 2023 The Life Cycle of a Flea, Phillida Reid, London, UK; 2022 Liquid Gold, Southard Reid, London, UK; Semi Permanent Interventions, Magic Stop, Lausanne, Switzerland; Burner Phone Hex, Ridley Road Project Space, London, UK; 2021 Art Basel Miami Beach with Southard Reid, London, UK; 2019–2020 DESCENT, Southard Reid, London, UK.

Group exhibitions include: 2026 In a Free State, Luring Augustine, New York; Make Haste Slowly, Fondazione Memmo, Rome; CONDO London, Phillida Reid, London, UK; 2025 Chi Esce Entra, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome; 2024 A time when the dogs barked every night, Woonhuis, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Immortal Apples, Eternal Eggs, Hastings Contemporary, Hastings, UK; Good Morning, Midnight, The Courtauld, London, UK; 2023 di Venezia, Spazio Punch, Giudecca, Italy; Close Looking: Collection Studies from the Roberts Institute of Art, The Roberts Institute of Art, Cromwell Place, London; forms of the surrounding futures, Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art curated by João Laia, Gothenburg, Sweden; Everything Broken Down, curated by Ryan Gander, Solid Haus, UK; Recent Acquisitions and Eternal Loves – Part I,