SIN CENTRE
31st May – 14th September, 2024
Hannah Barry in Peckham is one of the city’s brightest art spots, but there’s always been a dark (and slightly seedy) Soho walk-up vibe to the metal door round the corner from the station that leads into the gallery. So, perhaps aptly, this summer they’re inviting you to step inside to explore their ‘Sin Centre’.
The name and concept of the show comes from the work of Michael Webb, a member of Archigram, a group of avant-garde British architects who created speculative spaces and places (i.e. they stayed on paper and weren’t really built) in the 1960s and onwards.
Webb presented his Sin Centre as a design for a building in Leicester Square which would provide a series of leisure spaces over multiple flowing floors, with delights including vending machines filled with “coffee, coke and dirty books”. It all sounds a lot better than the real Leicester Square.
The name of the game with this 2024 update is to “satisfy the unruly mind, forge connection, offer surprise and delight”. Sounds great! So why is this all so sinful?
Press pause, and how much do you really think about your sins? Whether we’re talking transgressions of divine law, Nigella Lawson leering over a chocolate cake, or oil companies pouring one out for the climate crisis, sin is always kind of ‘in’ and ‘out’ at the same time.
We all know people who seem to find everything they do sinful. We all know people who seem to live in a world seemingly absent of the concept of their own sin. We might be both these sorts of people ourselves. But sin is also an impersonal visitor. We cannot magic it away when it arrives unwanted, no more than we can conjure up virtue at the drop of a hat.
This show runs at sin from a less handwringing angle. There are no racy nudes, and pretty much no flirtations with religious controversy to whip the tabloids into a frenzy. While you enter to the sight of a bright neon ‘CASINO’ sign by Simon Whybray, it’s all pretty sensual rather than sinful.
A case in point is the reading room upstairs, called the Love Library. It’s filled with sublimely soft (and hard) sofas, chairs and chaise longues by painter George Rouy – they’re his first attempts at furniture, and apparently he can do no wrong. They’re joined by some fun Paloma Proudfoot ceramics, while Danny Fox has done a pair of paintings and lamps.
Inspired by Paul Preciado’s essay Library Love from 2019, the room is designed like an office space-cum-salon, with a long wall of books to peruse (a beautiful Ex Libris inside explains who’s donated/selected each one). If you don’t fancy reading then there’s a telly and a stereo playing at the same time. I got ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and Sade when I was in there, but there are lots of fun combinations that will crop up like ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and Lauryn Hill or ‘All About my Mother’ and Philip Glass.
Downstairs is the Room of Curtains, which is exactly what you’d expect. ‘100 sec with you’ by Marie Jacotey is oil pastel on 20 metres of fabric, suspended from a stunning bit of metalwork by Soft Baroque (who I love). It’s more a heart wrenching poem of love, sex and loss than an ode to sin, but that doesn’t make it any less beguiling as you wander round its folds and follow its stories.
The room is also perfumed with the deliciously naughty smell of PVC curtains, which make up part of Ebun Sodipo’s installation, while Stevie Dix has created a lush digital jacquard door drape called ‘Paranoid (1970)’, a reference to Black Sabbath’s debut single of the same year – the birth of a whole new era of sin (depending on how you feel about heavy metal).
As it’s designed to be a space for amusement, there are bevvies and snacks in the room next door, where Melloney Harvey and Jesse Pollock’s red ‘Doors of Hell’ drinks bar is a delight. Rouy also did the leather strap lanterns hanging from the ceiling, and there’s a woozy oil painting of buttplugs and other bits called ‘Toolbox’ by Tali Lennox hanging on the wall amongst the assorted kink of the works.
If the Balenciaga furore of late 2022 was a case in point for the ability of fetish culture to still just about cause a panic, it showed how the profane (leather daddy teddy bears) needed to touch the sacred (children’s bedrooms) for our moral barometer (Kim Kardashian) to react. But, here at Hannah Barry, sin is just pretty damn fun.
It speaks to a moment. In about a decade, the progeny of OnlyFans megastars will be stepping into the hallowed halls of the UK’s top public (read ‘private’) schools. The children of bankers, oil company execs (hi Dad) and tech founders have had their time alone on the pristine playing fields.
We all know any exhibition on true transgression would focus on the likes of BP (from whom the British museum took a £50m, 10-year sponsorship deal last year) rather than BDSM. But, FUNdamentally, this show is less about moral judgement and more about plain old pleasure.
The gallery text comes with a quote from John 8:11 saying “Go, and sin no more”. Something tells me they don’t quite mean it. London’s weather is really not giving Summer of Love, so it’s probably time to head inside for a Summer of Sin, whatever that looks like to you.
