As Southard Reid prepares to unveil the London artist’s Online Viewing Room solo presentation, Harry Thorne dives into his many worlds

Can we divorce our inner desires from our shame? Prem Sahib dissects our most intimate moments

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We do a lot to ensure the safety of our communities. We seek one another, find kindred spirits, and, when necessary, retreat, constructing clandestine architectures within which to perform our true identities. We retreat in order to move closer to our collective selves.Central to Prem Sahib’s work is one such sanctuary – men-only cruising clubs, those increasingly threatened spaces that, to use the artist’s words, ‘[allow] you to lose yourself, escape societal constraints, or simply to fuck.’ For ‘DESCENT I. People Come &amp; Go’, held in November 2019 and the first of a three-part exhibition series at Southard Reid gallery in Soho, London, Sahib reproduced the subterranean area of one such club, a veritable labyrinth located in nearby Warren Street. As viewers felt their way through immersive tunnels of steel and claustrophobic red, they met with half-stripped men, abject and unresponsive, as if sacrificed to ecstasy or a far darker force.&nbsp;

Such tensions define the ‘DESCENT’ series: How safe are our ‘safe spaces’ – and how inclusive? How might we divorce our inner desire from our shame? How might we exist between multiple environments, multiple identities – and to what end? This last question of dissociation pulsed through ‘DESCENT II. Cul-de-Sac’, held the following month, at which footage shot by a drone meandering through the street where Sahib grew up was shown. As the mounted camera blinked, shuddered, and floated above the busy street, a soundtrack played fragments of sleep-talking and drunken arguments, intermingled with snippets of Sahib’s late father playing the flute. ‘DESCENT II. Cul-de-Sac’ pertained to a different type of descent, then, this one of heritage, but it circled a similar notion of plurality, of living as and among many people simultaneously, of slippery selfhood.&nbsp;

From the club to the street to the home. The exhibition ‘DESCENT III. Man Dog’, which recently completed the series, approximated domesticity: kennels, dog bowls, a mirror cut from obsidian glass, also entitled Man Dog. From the mirror, issues the recording of a conversation Sahib once had on Chatroulette, an online chat room that pairs users at random. Markedly unstable, Sahib’s partner flicks between homophobia, racism, and astounding hypocrisy. Most notable, however, is his loneliness: ‘I come on here to chat randomly to something. I don’t care if you’re even human. I seen a dog on here once, looked better than most of them, and I talked to him.’We buy into our delusions of freedom. Whether in a club, a community, or a domestic setting, we convince ourselves that we are safeguarded against society’s many systems of control. But as Sahib’s work makes evident, even the most comfortable of spaces can also be exclusionary, alienating, weird; even the most innocuous of environments can be governed by oppressive systems of their own. ‘Domesticated’ is just a fancy word for ‘captive,’ after all.

Southard Reid is presenting Prem Sahib’s work in Art Basel’s inaugural&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/viewing-rooms" target="_blank">Online Viewing Rooms</a>, find out more&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/viewing-rooms" target="_blank">here</a>. Harry Thorne is a writer and editor based in London. He is the editor of Gaia Foundation, a contributing editor of The White Review and former associate editor of Frieze magazine

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