Documents of a recent past is a new exhibition by Prem Sahib (b. 1982, London) that brings together image, text, furniture and sound that centre around and depart from The Backstreet — London’s oldest and longest-running gay leather bar, which closed in 2022 after almost four decades.  

Sahib works primarily in sculpture, installation, performance, sound, video and photography. Sahib’s practice embodies a poetic and provocative “destabilised minimalism”, referencing the architecture of public and private queer spaces, structures that shape individual and communal identities, senses of belonging, alienation and confinement. 

Located in Mile End, East London, The Backstreet first opened in 1985 and was popular amongst the leather and fetish community. Following Sahib’s photographs of the gay saunas Chariots Shoreditch and Chariots Waterloo in 2016, the artist was prompted to document the interior of The Backstreet in 2017 due to rumours of its closure as the result of ongoing proposals for the development of the building. 

The images, taken by Sahib and photographer Mark Blower, were primarily conceived as a social record of the space, and are exhibited publicly for the first time in this exhibition. Extending their enquiries into interiority, marginal spaces and archival practices, Sahib will also present a new audiovisual work-in-progress, Footnotes for Heros. This work pairs text notations with an audio recording made at The Backstreet night, ‘Club Heros’, in 2015, alongside furniture from the venue.

Mixing the personal and political, abstraction and figuration, Sahib’s formalism is suggestive of the body as well as its absence, drawing attention to traces of touch and frameworks of looking that evokes an emotional response from minimalist language.