Overview

For their exhibition Doubles, artist Prem Sahib brings together objects and sculptural interventions that stretch beyond the last decade, referencing the local area, both past and present. The exhibition explores the idea of a copy or replica, as it pertains to performance, mimicry, memory, deception and perceived threat.

Sahib’s work will inhabit rooms in the historic manor to evoke memories of former buildings and past encounters in neighbouring Walpole Park. Sahib draws on Soane’s use of repeated casts of objects or innovative use of mirrors, to undertake new interventions which destabilise how we read the space.

Central to the exhibition is the relationship between the inside of the manor and the exterior of the park. The exhibition will feature a major new outdoor bronze sculpture, sited in Pitzhanger’s gardens — the artist’s most significant outdoor commission to date. The new sculpture will mirror its counterpart, Apotropaic 1 (2023), which visitors will encounter in the manor, pairs of suspended hooded sweatshirts, one hovering above the other in an ambiguous embrace — a meditation on protection, tenderness, and presence/absence.

Upstairs, Front (2017) will see an architectural re-rendering of a window from a public toilet that once stood in the park transposed inside the building’s interior. Archive (2019), an installation of ephemera from the archive of Sahib’s uncle, a race equality campaigner during the 1980s in Southall, will bring narratives from the nearby area inside.

At night, a light installation, Liquid Gold (2016), will illuminate rooms in the manor, turning the building into a beacon. This will be echoed by a similar installation in a building in Southall in September, connecting the two sites at points during the exhibition run.

In Doubles, questions of mimicry, marginalisation and queer desire suffuse the spaces of Pitzhanger, inviting visitors to question who belongs, who is seen, and who is heard in museums and civic spaces.