Critical review with Sanchit Bembi
- Aug 11
- 2 min read
Written by Sophie Nowakowska Can we truly trust our vision? Our mind? What if it's playing tricks on us, and how would we ever tell the real from the unreal? Or maybe nothing is being tricked at all. Maybe everything we see is real, and it's simply seen differently.
Sanchit Bembi works across photography, interaction design, and fabrication, and that spread makes sense once you know the two conditions he lives with: synaesthesia and visual snow syndrome, which keep his sight unsettled, colours shifting, static and distortion running through everything he looks at. He doesn't just depict these conditions. He builds with them, using cross-sensory experience as a tool for making images.
Is art the only way to show someone what we actually see, what we actually feel, or what we don't? For those of us without his conditions, that question runs underneath everything here. In Bembi's photographs, movement gets pulled further and further from anything recognisable. Bodies break down into splashes, smears, shapes that won't hold still long enough to name. Colour drifts from black into pink, red into orange. Gaps open up not only between one movement and the next but also between colour and sound. The body turns liquid, caught mid-flow, boxed into a rectangle whose size, time, and space the artist controls by hand.
Bembi describes his conditions as an integral part of him, not a loss, which flips the question back on the rest of us: what if we're the ones going without? What if it's our sense of movement, our sense of sound, that falls short?
Photography was built to freeze a single moment of motion. In Bembi's hands, it circles back to that original job, except the life being recorded isn't only the one standing in front of the lens. It's the shifting, distorted experience of whoever's standing behind it, finger on the shutter. He carries the same thinking into healthcare. His conditions aren't framed as something gone wrong or something to fix. They become spaces worth wandering into, parts of his own life to sit with and turn over. At times it feels almost like a playground he's built, one he's holding the gate open for others to enter.
Here's where I'd want to see him go further. Most of the work so far has stayed inside the rooms with white walls, which feels slightly off given what the work is actually doing. His conditions don't clock out once the gallery closes. They run through his everyday life. So what happens if the work follows him there, into spaces less tidy and less enclosed than four white walls? I'd like to see it scaled up, other materials pulled in, the room itself turned into something you step inside rather than stand in front of.
London doesn't lack art about identity or lived experience. What it lacks is work that treats a different way of perceiving as the actual method, not just the theme. As Bembi's projects get bolder and reach wider audiences, he's positioned to make room, real room, for other artists working from the far edges of perception to get taken seriously here finally.
