Sabrina Chou

Placebo Placebo Effect circulates around the placebo, double, substitute, or sham as alternate approaches to representation and reproduction. It speaks of placebos not merely as stand-in dummies, but also as deferrals of a demand to appear, as decoys that can lure you aside, or antidotes to the fallacy of seeing-as-believing. Considering the placebo as a sculptural strategy, the works propose to remove a body from its typical use or labor value and place it beside itself, in an unknown state—whether the real thing or its side effect.

The exhibition presents a new series of hand-carved wooden sausages alongside their reproductions, as close to identical as can be achieved by means of chiselling, whittling and sanding. The painstaking attempt to reproduce each form also introduces a tension between handmade labour and the logic of industrial repetition: an effort to produce sameness that can never quite escape difference. Hosted in sculptural scenarios that highlight their doubling through different states of dis-/re-placement, each sculpture will speak to its own alternative, a suggestion of an(other) body, a defective teleportation that dislocates self from self.

Placebo Placebo Effect offers an imprecise doubling in which the distinction between original and substitute remains unsettled – somewhere between the real thing and its side effect.

Placebo Placebo Effect, 2026
Solo exhibition at Coleman Projects, London, UK. Full press release available here (pdf).

Supported by Research at Central Saint Martins, UAL.

Muster Point, 2026
Hand-carved stone pine, steel panel clamp.
32.5 x 8.5 x 11.3 cm

Correlation, 2026
Hand-carved stone pine, chrome clothing rail.
22.2 x 240.5 x 39.5 cm

Procedural, 2026
Hand-carved stone pine, two-way mirror glass, flax butcher twine, suction cup hook, pine timber.
Dimensions variable. This instance: 300 x 119 x 206 cm

Devotion, 2026
Hand-carved stone pine, anti-static layflat tubing 3kg roll.
70 x 29 x 8 cm

Stop Stopper (part 1), 2026
Hand-carved stone pine, PVC half-round gutter, PVC half-round stopend, fascia brackets, gutter angle.
Two parts. Part 1: 10 x 11 x 7.5 cm

Diverted Sentiments, 2026
Hand-carved stone pine, handwoven cotton-linen textile (951 cm), steel ratchet, polyurethane foam, steel pulley.
210 x 82 x 56 cm

Stop Stopper (part 2), 2026
Hand-carved stone pine, PVC half-round gutter, PVC half-round stopend, fascia brackets, gutter angle.
Two parts. Part 2: Dimensions variable. This instance: 10 x 11 x 700 cm

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