Sound and Vision: Prem Sahib and Listening
Included in the new Hayward Curatorial Open exhibition, Listening (recently opened at Liverpool’s Bluecoat), and with an ICA solo show on the horizon, Prem Sahib caught up with us about throbbing noise, white cubes and touring your work
“Can you hear that beat outside?” Prem Sahib asks me.
I can’t. I listen harder.
“It’s someone playing music really loudly somewhere.”
I finally pick it out from the other noises of the city, a dull throbbing pulse.
We are sitting in front of a heater in Sahib’s studio at Cell Project Space, London, and he is telling me about his work which is currently touring the UK as part of the current Hayward Curatorial Open exhibition, Listening.
The show arrived at the Bluecoat this month, having travelled from its first home at BALTIC in Newcastle. After Liverpool it will go on to venues in Sheffield and Norwich. Now in its third year, the open competition invites applications from 'artists, writers and imaginative thinkers in all walks of life' to design an innovative new exhibition that re-invents how we think about art. This is a unique opportunity in an industry where most of the exhibitions staged by larger institutions come from a very particular and often elite group. We have not yet, however, seen a winning exhibition designed by the gallery invigilator, café/bar server or, indeed, any other individual that does not occupy the traditional roles of curator, critic or artist. It will be interesting to see if this will happen at some point down the line.
2014’s exhibition has been created by London-based artist Sam Belinfante and investigates the act of listening in contemporary visual art. Many of the 18 selected artists work in the fields of art and music and all pose questions about how we approach and interact with both the visual and the sonic in the gallery space. There is a great variety in the mediums on display, from drawings and sculpture to prints and video. Sahib, whose career has really taken off since graduation from the RA in 2013, is also in very good company with artists such as Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Christian Marclay and Ed Atkins also included in the exhibition.
Sahib’s installation, titled Taking Turns, consists of a large white cube or box structure set against a wall or corner in the gallery space. A soundtrack plays from within the cube with speakers inlaid into the wall causing a slight vibration. Blue-purple light (which Sahib describes pleasingly as being “like a bruise in the surface”) emanates from the interior edge, suggesting a nightclub hidden just out of view. The viewer is teased in, with the positioning of the cube in different spaces allowing for a narrow passage by which to approach the party, but then blocked by the work itself. “You can’t access it,” says Sahib, “this is a structure that you are navigated around. Part of the idea with the work is this frustration of not really being able to see or access something. There is enough space for you to poke your head around but you can’t physically occupy the internal space.” There is something rather Robert Gober-ish about this denial of full physical and visual access. Over Christmas I visited his major retrospective at MOMA and, in one incredibly seductive work, two identical bathrooms were installed with their doors opened just slightly, allowing visitors to just about see the limb of a person in a bathtub. Invigilators were on hand to make sure you didn’t even slightly brush against the surface of the door and the thwarted satisfaction of the artwork was delicious.
This pull-and-push role of the Taking Turns soundtrack, both drawing you in and obstructing you by design, is something curator Belinfante was particularly interested in for the exhibition. “Listening is not only the exhibition’s subject matter but also the method by which works are encountered and explored,” he says. “I want visitors to be playfully arrested and surprised by the ways in which they are directed around the space.”
Taking Turns was first shown at Frieze Art Fair in 2013, exhibited with several other objects made by Sahib surrounding it, but the work felt very different in this context. “It became this kind of physical plug at Frieze. You might not have been so alerted to it as a work as there were several other elements included and you might not have even attributed the sound you hear to the object. Walking around or near to it there would just be this kind of music coming from somewhere unspecific.”
This first iteration of the work at Frieze seems a fitting one, an inaccessible party happening in a white cube shown at, some would say, the ultimate in inaccessible art parties which is all staged around the notion, the culture and the power of the white cube. The context of the work changes, necessarily, with every new showing, and the touring exhibitions can be an interesting (and convenient) way to test out new ways of display, context and narratives. “I do think that it tests the work,” says Sahib. ”When I conceived of Taking Turns there were conditions I was really relying on, white walls for example. I now wonder how it would work in a brick wall space. The process has made me think about which conditions are super important for the work. It makes me face and evaluate the importance of framing and think about how much of how you, as an artist and as a viewer, approach the work as an autonomous object and how much of it is mediated by the conditions in which you place or view it.”
Constructing conditions or subverting the way in which we view and navigate artworks in a non-traditional gallery context is something that Sahib explores in his work frequently. In 2013 a solo exhibition at London’s Southard Reid (whom Sahib, like Belinfante, is represented by) saw the artist transform the gallery into a club for a single night and play with ideas of Freud’s Pleasure Principle and the politics of what we use the gallery space for and why we visit them. There is always a human element in Sahib's work, no matter how minimal he can get. These are not objects or ideas floating in space, they are firmly anchored in our human and often bodily interactions, our emotions, conflicts, excesses and weaknesses.
After a packed year of art fairs, New York shows and the Gwangju Biennale, Sahib is now gearing up for what will be the most ambitious project and high-profile exhibition of his career so far. The ICA have invited him to occupy their ground floor space for a solo exhibition in September. What does he have planned, then, for the progression of his work over the coming months?
“My initial ideas have been around building a kind of structure that fills the entirety of the space and creates intimate viewings for things,” he says. “I’m interested in using structures to sometimes obscure and weaken something that’s quite architectural. I think it and my ideas will change a million times before the show and that’s what I want. I want to be able to throw loads of ideas around see what happens.”
So let’s see what happens. Given the slickness of Sahib’s practice, it is exciting to be party to the initial stages and ideas for his new body of work, where everything is still possible and the end may look very different from the beginning.