It takes roughly three hours to fully absorb and engage with Artangel\u2019s most recent project, Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison<\/em>. As indicated by the show\u2019s title, the UK-based institution that privileges site-specific, context-oriented exhibitions, has mounted a group exhibition inside HM Prison Reading. The prison, a classic example of Victorian penal architecture, was built in 1844 and continued to function as a working prison until it was decommissioned in 2013\u200a\u2014\u200aby which point its capacity had, purportedly, tripled. Site, context, and\u200a\u2014\u200aperhaps most poignantly\u200a\u2014\u200atemporality (past and present), here weighs heavy. Looming over the prison is the shadow of its most famous inmate, Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned from May 1985 to May 1987, on charges of sodomy and gross indecency with men. Prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and forced to wear hoods when in public; hard labour involved turning barrels of rocks with a crank, and separating the tarred fibre scraps of old navy ropes: hence the phrase, \u201cmoney for old rope.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is a discomfiting contradiction at the heart of the show, whose works at times awkwardly straddle romantic ideologies of creative confinement and the punitive banality that resonates in the reality of the physical space. In Wilde\u2019s cell on the third floor, C33, his books are displayed alongside vases of carnations. It is here that Wilde wrote the famous prose poem to his erstwhile lover Bosie, entitled \u201cDe Profundis\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200afrom the depths, in deep honesty. Readings of the letter in its entirety have taken place during the course of the exhibition, by guests such as Patti Smith, Ben Whishaw, and Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n