Prem Sahib: Documents of a recent past

A kink is, by definition, a bend; it is an aberration, a deviation from the straight-line order of things. Sites predicated upon the exercise of kink sexualities are therefore spaces that, beyond the pursuit of pure bodily pleasure, also rehearse and experiment with what such non-normative spaces can be. One of the most revered in the United Kingdom was the Backstreet, an East London leather bar that, for thirty-seven years, was a staple of the city’s gay fetish community. Founded in 1985 by John Edwards, the Backstreet was known for its strict dress code, requiring patrons to wear full leather or rubber attire FIG.1. Having resisted the homogenising forces of austerity and gentrification for much of its history, the bar closed in 2022, following an unfulfilled promise of lasting sustainability from the Tower Hamlets Council.

In the pitch-black Project Space at Studio Voltaire, London, one encounters the Backstreet’s hollowed interior in a slideshow of photographs FIG.2, its form emptied and decaying. There are advertisements promoting long-past events, fraying carpets, ripped, curling posters and leather boots and steel cages hanging from the ceiling. Entirely absent are human bodies; the bar is a ghost-environment, speaking decisively in the past tense. The images, which are presented as a silent video work, were taken by Prem Sahib (b.1982) and the photographer Mark Blower in 2017, during one of the bar’s many periods of threatened closure. They constitute the central element of a melancholic exhibition by Sahib, an avowed Backstreet regular, which reiterates the artist’s preoccupation with the recording and reclamation of ‘lost’ queer spaces.

A minimally manipulated, decade-old audio recording plays through headphones placed atop two leather-capped stools FIG.3, which are taken from the Backstreet itself. In stark contrast to the visual elements of the exhibition, the sound recording is energetically charged, punctuated by casual chattering, clinking glass and a soundtrack of familiar dance-pop. Much of it could be classified as ambient noise similar to what one might expect from a muffled pocket dial, but isolated moments produce a narrative of sorts: an arrival at Mile End on public transport, a doorman’s welcome. The competing rhythms of the visual and sonic components invite the viewer to tune into their incidental synchronicities. Minor visual gestures that aim to mediate the aged material, such as frequent block colour intervals FIG.4, seem largely superfluous. By contrast, the long passages of white noise in the sound piece paradoxically allow the work’s disparate parts to coalesce into something more suggestive, cutting through the exhibition’s combination of otherwise traditional documentary modes to construct a site in which the visitor can pursue their own imaginative wanderings. However, the exhibition’s capacity to instil agency is frustrated by its formal complacency and predictable decision-making. The use of the bar’s furniture as exhibition seating, for example, does little to animate the space, leaving its evocation of the Backstreet curiously ‘vibe-less’, bereft of its character, history and embodied memory.

The repurposing of documentary and archival materials relating to sites built for sustaining queer sociality – gay bars, cruising areas, organising spaces – has become a familiar, if not ubiquitous, mode in recent queer cultural production. Echoing their work Do you care? We do (2017), which comprises lockers ‘salvaged’ from the Shoreditch flagship of the gay sauna chain Chariots, Sahib’s multimedia shrine to the Backstreet’s memory is premised upon an implicit claim to the minimalist sculptural potential of these ‘recovered’ objects. But such moves play differently in a time when the memorialisation of ‘lost’ queer space in contemporary art – often involving the incorporation of physical remnants alongside video and time-based elements that lend a poetic or ‘speculative’ cadence – has assumed its own orthodoxies and cliches, particularly as these approaches gain increasing traction in institutions.

In this context, Sahib’s exhibition registers as strikingly slight, hindered by unresolved tensions between the ‘documentation’ of its subject and the real-time transference of an environment for body-to-body encounters into apparently ‘archival’ matter. The atmosphere of the exhibition is still, rigid and unspontaneous, an impression amplified by an absence of any engagement with the political or economic forces at play in the Backstreet’s closure. Visitors are presented with a staid memory-palace that strips its subject of transgression by folding its history into the familiar codes of the art world, which demand little more than superficial gestures. In promotional material for the exhibition, Sahib has noted that they first visited the bar when it hosted a Rick Owens fashion party; they describe their awe at the Backstreet’s clientele ‘walking around and just looking at the walls as though it was a gallery’.¹ Sahib’s personal investment in the bar’s legacy as a site for alternative sexual expression is in no doubt, but this particular relationship to the space, mediated through their artist persona and networks, perhaps goes some way to explaining why the attempt to narrate its history in the vocabulary of documentary minimalism is marked by such affectlessness.

The tenor of commemoration at play in Sahib’s reconstitution of the Backstreet’s memory is further problematised by the bar’s well-documented investment in self-archiving. It had a history of marketing its own iconicity, even as it foregrounded its innate precarity as a centre for subcultural expression, and both the Museum of London and the Bishopsgate Institute now own dozens of artefacts from the site. In 1987 Tom of Finland (1920–91) was commissioned to produce two drawings for posters and flyers FIG.5, one of which became the club logo, adorning its merchandise. Moreover, a short documentary film about the Backstreet, directed by Romain Beck, premiered at film festivals in 2024; and the bar also has a longstanding Instagram account populated by old advertisements and newspaper cuttings that illustrate both the predictable queerphobic bile of the Fleet Street press and the adoration of the gay media.

Knowledge of this widespread archiving of the bar’s material memory exacerbates the exhibition’s sense of overfamiliarity. What exactly is achieved in the transplantation of this documentary material to a gallery setting in such unadorned and depersonalised terms? As a portrait of how an ephemeral ‘scene’ – one that is not only defined by its precarity but defines itself by the same condition – preserves and is preserved, the show leaves the visitor yearning for contradiction. One longs for something to grapple with beyond the too-easy signifiers: yet another ‘lost queer space’, another potentially rich counter-history reduced to predictable banalities in its institutional appropriation.