During the renovation of new gallery spaces at 10 – 16 Grape Street, Prem Sahib’s roaming work Liquid Gold will be viewable from the outside of the building, from sundown to sunrise, throughout the last weeks of July and into August.
In title and form, Liquid Gold is suggestive of substances deemed both precious and worthless, raising questions around the fluidity or tangibility of value, and the malleability of the forms in which value is held. The phrase simultaneously refers to precious metals in states of material flux, bodily effluence, and a popular brand of poppers – a web of associations that hint at alchemical processes of transformation and transcendence.
Always viewed from a building‘s exterior, Liquid Gold occupies space through the codified use of colour, turning its site into a vessel and expanding, like a fluid, to fill – or overspill – its proportions. Produced simply using LEDs and yellow gels, the light acts as an unruly substance, leaking beyond the windows to pool on the street. Repositioning the viewer to the outside of the space, and materialising, like nocturnal sunlight, beyond usual opening hours, the work becomes an inversion of the typical gallery and museum model of audience engagement: an invitation to casual passers-by.
Liquid Gold was first conceived as part of Sahib's White Cubicle installation spinning lil’ white lies about his crepuscular time in yellow at The George and Dragon, London, in 2013, and has since been exhibited at Grand Union, Birmingham, Whitechapel Gallery, London and most recently Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE.
