Overview

Mirror, Mirror is the largest solo presentation of Permindar Kaur’s work in a London institution to date and will take place across the main gallery and the historic manor. Kaur’s installations use a visual language of toys, clothing, and shelter to explore how domestic settings shape individuals, and how identity and background relates to these things. Child-like figures equipped with claws, horns, or beaks haunt the gallery like sentinels or misfits, suggesting protection, defiance or both. Drawing on cultural symbolism, including ceremonial Sikh colours such as saffron and navy, her works use techniques of camouflage whilst simultaneously asserting their presence. Throughout, motifs suggesting a high society country house — such as pairs of antlers — are set against materials such as felt or fleece, which suggest both the safety of a childhood comfort blanket or toy as well as the realities of everyday life.

Kaur has responded to Soane’s historic interiors by inserting new and existing works into different rooms, bringing a heightened dialogue between the home of Soane’s day and creating a sense of the manor being inhabited today with contemporary works — introducing both relatability and uneasiness in equal measure. Her interventions also speak to ideas of hierarchy and status threaded through Soane’s architecture. In several rooms, her chameleon-like figures appear to morph and merge into the historic fabric of the building — at once interlopers and guests.

The exhibition brings together new commissions including Threshold (2025) alongside recent works not previously been shown in a gallery, including Washing Line Beds (2024), an installation of black steel bed frames overhung with washing lines. Our clothes reflect our desires and hopes, the work exploring questions of status and aspiration. The title Mirror, Mirror alludes to the reflection of self — how we see ourselves, and how we are perceived by others. In evoking the character of the mirror in Snow White, Kaur points to childhood as a key site of identity formation, and begs the question of who is the truth-telling voice in the mirror and asking where does that come from?