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  workout | 2016

“Art in Prisons” is a project aiming to popularise community work in prisons initiated by contemporary artists. For the first time in Poland joint workshops involving artists and inmates have been carried out on such a large scale. Classes, discussions, lectures and workshops, prepared by artists and social activists, have taken place at various Polish prisons. The project, developed as an integrated participative action, is meant not only to help rehabilitate the inmates and prepare them for a return to life outside, but also to provoke potential recipients to reflect on the contemporary notion of punishment, its long-term rationale, and its role, if any, in overhauling the convicts’ personalities and value systems. The ideas of Michel Foucault are all too obvious a reference here, but investigating the penitentiary system, and the notion of punishment in particular, remains key to understanding the mechanisms of social development and, consequently, the next stage of transformation that can be conceived to change society. Through their activity at prisons, artists not only declare their willingness to help the inmates, but also receive from them an infinite amount of information and emotions. Contact with incarcerated persons provokes one to ask questions – about social values, the fairness of judicial procedures, the populism/politicisation of penal policy, but also about one’s own transgression, about what everyone is capable of doing. This confrontation with the prison world became a strong impulse that, in many cases, released a mutual creative potential. Another aspect was the integration of the artists themselves. It was a rather symbolic gesture, an experiment undertaken to find out whether artists can and want to work together. Characteristically for the neoliberal society, contemporary artistic practice has been increasingly solitary, isolated. Through meeting and discussing their experience of working with inmates, artists were able to voice the intention of working together and start an open discussion between themselves. Moreover, the project’s participants have initiated actions that will be continued, establishing new connections between inmates, personnel and artists; ideas of new joint projects have already been conceived. “Art in Prisons” is a project meant to make the recipient aware of the importance of engaged art, to encourage him to follow up with further action, and, above all, to provoke him to reflect critically on the sense thereof, on the shape of the penitentiary system, on how it is a mirror of the larger social order, and on whether, and if so, how, it can be changed.