Prem Sahib: Chamber review – master of unease twists the city into terror and pleasure

Prem Sahib turns the city inside out, twists it around and rips it apart. His show at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, a sort of mid-career survey for the 44-year-old English artist, is full of private spaces and urban nightmares that have been gutted and left on display. It’s minimal, claustrophobic, intense stuff.

A sodium street lamp hangs upside down from the ceiling, casting its sickly pale orange glow across the gallery. You feel like you’ve stumbled into some urban back alley where physics has been flipped, it has all the threat of an underpass, but surreal and inverted. Nearby, three puffer jackets have been squeezed between sheets of glass – are these the blokes who were waiting for you in the underpass? Or are they three strangers who you’ve caught mid-embrace?

That’s what Sahib does, over and over: he plays with the line between terror and pleasure, threat and intimacy, public and private.

So much here is geared towards an atmosphere of discomfort. There’s a deep bass throb echoing out of one space, its tone eventually rising to an ear-piercing squeal, before settling back into a chest-rattling sub. A table has been made out of a grossly overgrown flea’s body, a street sign has been left blank but its light is still on. Two space heaters constantly flick on and ramp up the temperature. It is liminal, weird, uncomfortable.

Queerness is central to Sahib’s work. The double doors you pass as you walk in were taken from a Mile End leather bar that closed in 2022, the water fountain encased in resin is from Chariots sauna in Shoreditch which closed in 2016. Private spaces, places of intimate pleasure, that have been erased from the city.

In one of his signature resin panels, clear droplets have accumulated on a sheet of black aluminium, like sweat gathering on a nightclub wall. You can almost smell it, almost feel hot, damp, writhing people coming together somewhere nearby. Hung up high, two acrylic discs nod to the visual results of rapid HIV tests. There’s intimacy here, but risk too.

Risk, and threat: an obsidian mirror hangs cracked on the wall, burbling out discordant sounds, a slowed down recording of a homophobic rant sent to Sahib on a gay chat room.

Is this all about architecture, as the wall text here insists? I don’t know. Architecture is already about architecture – I don’t need art to make me think deep thoughts about buildings. This feels way more intimate than that description coldly implies. It’s about bodies being pressed together, sweat dripping down a wall, and feeling like it’s all about to be torn away from you.

The whole way through, it’s as if Sahib is asking: what happens when the places that matter to me, where I express myself, are destroyed? What is left for me, for us? Who decides which spaces can survive, who decides what communities are worth preserving, who decides where bodies get to exist?

I don’t think it all works. The recording of Suella Braverman hatefully talking about the migrant crisis that you listen to while looking out at the sea is a bit on the nose, and the little dotty images of the horizon that line one wall don’t really add a huge amount.

But for the most part, Sahib is brilliant, with an incredible knack for crushingly intense minimalist atmospherics. He’s been one of the most interesting artists working in this country for more than a decade now, and a big institutional show like this feels long overdue.

• Prem Sahib: Chamber is at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, from 10 October 2026 to 3 January 2027