Over the last few decades, galleries have increasingly become popular spaces for both reflection and socialising, all the while providing an experience with artworks that can be as personal as a relationship. But what happens when art is hidden away in a secluded space, one originally created to control and restrict behaviour? Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison a project organised by the non-profit agency Artangel, poses this question by staging an exhibition within Reading Prison, which has laid empty since 2013.
In 1895, Oscar Wilde became Reading Prison’s most famous inhabitant after he was convicted of committing “acts of gross indecency with other male persons” and sentenced to two years of hard labour. The experience crippled him, with Wilde losing his family, career and reputation. After being released he moved to France where he died three years later at the age of forty-six. The exhibition draws upon this history, and that of the building, to bring together a range of responses by both writers and artists.
When Reading Prison opened in 1844 it was one of the first to put prisoners in separate rooms rather than a communal dormitory, which meant that there was no communication between prisoners who were encouraged to focus on private reflection and prayer. Inside begins by focusing on that fact, highlighting the physical reality of the prison by presenting floor-plans of the building and period texts that explain the benefits of solitary confinement. Along one corridor, photographs of prisoners taken between 1885 and 1910 are displayed, which draw attention towards the many men, women and children who were incarcerated, and later often disappeared without a trace. By foregrounding the architectural, written and visual forms through which people were controlled and catalogued, Inside creates an interesting analogy between notions of imprisonment and exhibition-making.
Artangel: Inside
The display reiterates feelings of isolation and confinement by placing most of the works within separate cells, with the second of the three floors mostly focusing on specific figures who have been imprisoned or persecuted. In one cell, artist Marlene Dumas exhibits a large portrait of Wilde that sits alongside a small painting of his boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas, titled after his nickname Bosie. Their relationship was notoriously volatile, and it was Douglas’ father who instigated a campaign against Wilde that led to his imprisonment. As with many of her paintings, Dumas uses this history, the fact that Wilde’s own cell can be visited a few doors down, and the closely cropped depiction of each figure to create an informal and personal relationship between inanimate objects. This relationship between the art object and the cell-environment is appropriately referenced through the inclusion of historic prints and paintings relating to the imprisonment of Irish Republicans in the H-block prison by Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton.
On the following floor, many of the works draw more specifically on ideas around confinement, enclosure and escape. Having already dealt with imprisonment in his 2008 feature film Hunger, director Steve McQueen chooses to follow a less narrative route in The Winter, an installation that consists of a prison bunk-bed covered with a shimmering 24-carat gold mosquito net. A film by Wolfgang Tillmans uses the view from the prison windows to create a series of grid-like abstractions that provide little indication of an outside world, while Peter Dreher’s series of paintings depicting a single glass of water encapsulate the repetitive and austere reality of imprisonment. When there is a suggestion of freedom, as in Robert Gober’s installation of a water-feature that is embedded within a man’s jacket hung on a wall, it only serves to reinforce the severity of prison life.
Spread throughout the cells are a series of real and imagined letters written by nine contemporary writers that can be read or listened to on headphones. In one letter, Jeanette Winterson takes on the role of Hermione from Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale, while Ai Weiwei draws upon his actual imprisonment by Chinese authorities in 2011, and Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina writes to his deceased mother about hiding his sexuality in a country where it is illegal. With most of the art and text placed within the cells, viewers are forced to enter into a contemplative relationship with the work that cannot always be achieved in a modern gallery environment and which, importantly, place themselves in the position of an inmate. This is made all the more palpable by the marks that have been left on the walls from when the prison was last used by male offenders aged 18 to 21.
The inclusion of text works also reiterates just how essential communication is to being human. Contact of any kind between prisoners was forbidden and they had restricted access to books and writing paper. It was only toward the end of Wilde’s sentence that he was permitted to write a letter to Bosie that would turn into the 50,000 word monologue De Profundis . Every Sunday the text will be read aloud in the prison chapel on a sculpture by Jean-Michel Pancin that places Wilde’s actual prison door on the end of a cell-sized concrete slab. Neil Bartlett’s rendition of the text can already be watched online , and subsequent readings will be done by performers ranging from Patti Smith to Maxine Peake. It is through this combination of personal and public histories, set in a specific space and time, that Inside becomes more than a typical exhibition of objects and words but a declaration of how important it is to remember the oppression of figures past and present.
Nan Goldin seems to be aware of this significance and uses Inside to cast the viewer in a number of different roles. In one cell, her photographs of a naked Clemens Schick cover the walls like the bedroom of a randy teenager; in another she exhibits filmed interviews with a young gay Ukrainian man and the 93-year-old George Montague, who is calling for an apology from the British Government for the criminal charges that were brought against him and many other homosexuals – thereby drawing attention to the fact that homosexuality in Britain was legalised only 51 years ago. Then in her final cell, Goldin has projected Jean Genet’s beautiful 1950 film Un Chant d’Amour with the door locked so that you can only view the relationship between the two prisoners by going up close to the peephole. In doing so, Goldin makes us enact the same gesture as a prison guard, a homosexual lusting after another body, and doing what we all do in galleries: looking, but not touching.
Fiontán Moran is assistant curator at Tate, where he has worked on exhibitions including Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden and Malevich. Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison will be open until 30 October 2016.
Artangel: Inside