From the Autumn 2015 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

“Eddie works across disciplines – painting, performance, sculpture, music videos – in a way that doesn’t ever feel self-conscious about being ‘multidisciplinary’. I remember one of his earliest performances from our final year at The Slade. He was collaborating with the artist Sam Hacking; she was dressed in a fox costume and Eddie was in his normal clothes. The performance involved them struggling to swap outfits without getting undressed. It was awkward to watch, but totally captivating – as though one person was emerging from the anonymity of costume, of characterisation, while the other disappeared into it.

Both Eddie and I are interested in the experience of sexuality and how that plays out in the context of a social group, but I’m always moved by how his work confronts the viewer directly. At the opening of his recent show at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill in Rome, a female performer read a monologue that slipped between gritty Italian slang and a parody of aristocratic English – in and out of comprehension – while performing stereotypically male gestures. She also spoke about her erection. Eddie had managed to communicate something about the way that human subjectivity is multiple – we all contain different genders, languages and characters. It was incredibly powerful.”

Eddie Peake: The Forever Loop at the Barbican, London, 9 October – 10 January 2016

“Prem has always seemed to invest a lot of time, energy and thought into a relatively small number of works. I’ve always been jealous of his ability to create things that are at once minimal and elaborate: immaculate and beautiful, but with dramatic backstories. His aesthetic draws heavily on the environs and interiors of saunas, techno clubs, leather bars and public toilets that might be co-opted for covert gay sex. There is a high-design element to his work, which is subverted by the charged narratives – often personal, autobiographical and sexual – at play.

DJ and club culture and dance music are part of both of our personal histories and a common inspiration. We collaborate regularly with the artist George Henry Longly for our clubnight, Anal House Meltdown. For the first event, at Vogue Fabrics in London in 2011, Prem and I staged a performance called Darkroom. The audience were in a blacked-out room with a group of men making sounds, who were exposed for a split second by a short blast of light. I think we share an interest in venues where the distinction between public and private can be a bit blurred, and where sex and sexuality can be performed as a form of spectacle.”

Prem Sahib, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 24 September – 15 November 2015

Amy Sherlock is Reviews Editor of frieze