Prem Sahib Captures the Unruly Aesthetics of Desire

LONDON — Prem Sahib’s art is known for its minimalism and formal restraint. It consists of carefully choreographed installations and pared-back sculptural pieces that interrogate the architecture and structures shaping communal identities and queer experiences. But Sahib is also interested in the more chaotic aesthetics of fetish bars and nightclubs, dark spaces in which unruly bodies and complex social codes coalesce to form unique environments. 

Located in a small, darkened room of Studio Voltaire, Documents of a Recent Past is a slideshow of photographs by Sahib and photographer Mark Blowe depicting the interior of The Backstreet, London’s oldest gay leather and fetish bar, which closed in 2022. Sahib’s own austere style stands in stark contrast to this messy, maximalist space; the photographs expose the club’s scuffed paintwork, peeling posters, and dusty cobwebs clinging to leather boots, masks, and chains. Yet a sense of tenderness permeates these carefully captured details, which perhaps went unobserved by many of the patrons in the club’s heyday, obscured by a haze of intoxication, sexual excitement, and cigarette smoke. 

At the same time, the photographs reveal the artist’s wry awareness of the banality of lust. The audiovisual work-in-progress “Footnotes for Heros” (2025), shown on a wall-mounted screen opposite the photographs, provides textual footnotes to an audio recording made during a 2015 club night at The Backstreet. Alongside the sounds of pumping music, inaudible chatter, and a running tap, Sahib muses on how many people have washed their genitals in the club’s sinks and whether they used the hand drier or paper towels to awkwardly dry themselves off afterwards.

The exhibition’s visitors can sit on silver-framed stools topped with black leather as they watch the images unfold. These came from the club itself, and Sahib recalls in one of the footnotes: “Sometimes, they were sticky from lube and the sugar drinks that had been spilled onto their surface. When I got them home, I laid tarpaulin on the floor of the dining room and began cleaning. They produced Tupperware boxes full of brown water.” The statement suggests that sex acts and art practice are inextricably tied to the same quotidian practical processes and concerns around facilitation, comfort, and cleanliness. 

Throughout this compact exhibition, Sahib alludes to bodies through their absence. The photographs of The Backstreet are replete with unoccupied chairs and empty boots and masks, poetically evoking the bodies that once filled them. Throughout the installation’s audio and visual elements traces of touch are an elegy to a lost meeting place. 

Prem Sahib: Documents of a Recent Past continues at Studio Voltaire (1A Nelsons Row, London, England) through March 23. The exh

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