If you search ‘Suella Braverman anti-immigration policies’ on YouTube, you can lose yourself in a sea of hate speech. Videos of the former Home Secretary in the House Of Commons, at a Tory Party conference, and in press interviews are all there with some of her most controversial statements neatly edited into bite-size chunks. Comment sections have been switched off due to racist rhetoric spilling out from keyboards. There’s a ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ war going on as if this could capture everything we feel, think and believe in. 

This is what I searched on YouTube before meeting Prem Sahib, a London-based artist whose emotionally charged installations and performances disrupt the private and public spheres. As well as having an outdoor site-specific installation called Liquid Gold running through August, Sahib will also present the Scottish premiere of their performance work, Alleus, at Edinburgh Art Festival. Originally co-commissioned by the Roberts Institute Of Art and Somerset House Studios, this iteration of Alleus will unfold around a staircase in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle.

Alleus spelt backwards is Suella. Cunningly, not only could the title be mistaken for ‘alias’, but it also nods towards the simplistic, spiteful rhetoric such as ‘send the boats back’ which has been repeated by the Tories. ‘By reversing, I feel like I am refuting the point of her words,’ reflects Sahib. But the artist is quick to point out that they wish to de-centre Braverman; they are firmly aware that she isn’t the sole perpetrator of hate speech legitimised through party politics but, in this particular work, she is the chosen cipher. Through Alleus, we can recognise the damage caused when politicians speak ‘on behalf of the British people’ as they tell the story of immigration, often turning to outlandish natural disaster metaphors to dehumanising effect.

To create Alleus, Sahib collaged two of Braverman’s most infamous speeches together and treated them ‘sculpturally’ by manipulating the sound. The work combines live and pre-recorded voices to move from ‘legible language to something more abstract’. As spoken word transforms into song and culminates ‘with a blustery cacophony of words that emulate a hurricane’, Sahib shares that the work structurally mirrors Braverman’s address at the House Of Commons in March 2023.

In this particular speech, Braverman described immigration of the 20th century as ‘a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming’. The work is layered, having evolved from an audio piece into a performance, with additional speech material incorporated as it developed. While scouring the internet for more source material, Sahib stumbled across a clip of Nigel Farage and Priti Patel dancing and chanting along to Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’. Sahib turned this into the outro of Alleus.

While sonically changed, Sahib never alters the words of Braverman’s speeches. The content guidance for the August performance warns that Alleus speaks ‘openly about racism, violence’ and features sounds of ‘xenophobic dialogue’. When I ask Sahib about how they look after themselves during the creative process, they describe Alleus as deliberately confronting.

‘There is sometimes a desire to tune out the language we have been living around,’ Sahib ruminates, adding that Alleus is ‘quite harrowing, but so are her words.’ By refusing to dilute Braverman’s words and their meaning, Sahib subverts the seduction of ‘political theatre’ and its accompanying complicity, a framework that the artist credits to sociologist Richard Sennett in his podcast Thinking Allowed. Brexiteers, for instance, had ‘been had’ or tricked by Boris Johnson’s bumbling performance without understanding the consequences of leaving the European Union, and in doing so, were complicit. 

Alleus could be framed as a protest work, but Sahib doesn’t interpret it that way. ‘For me, protest is directed more pointedly towards a specific goal or intention, and I would hope has far-reaching real-world consequences. But I do see the work as political.’ With arts organisations experiencing existential crises about what they can or cannot say, Sahib speaks about the ‘disparity between what an artist is trying to say and how an institution reacts in real-time’. The medium of performance offers Sahib an opportunity to respond with urgency and they are grateful to all the commissioners for creating space to do so. 

There’s a pithy clip on the internet of Braverman describing how she hopes she annoys the Left, which is met by a wave of Conservative laughs. Were she ever to stumble upon Alleus, it’s intriguing to consider how she would respond to it. 

Alleus, Castle Terrace Car Park, 16 August, 6.30pm; Liquid Gold, Bard, 9–25 August, 9pm–5am.