Art as punishment presents artworks created by students who have spent anywhere from three years to a few weeks at the Agder Art Academy. In addition, professional artists have given workshops which have resulted in larger collaborative works with the students. All the artists exhibit under first names as Agder Art Academy is a collective project, and that is how we got to know each other in the study situation. The exhibition’s title, Art as punishment , has been chosen by Agder Art Academy’s students. The phrase has been an internal joke that refers to how art can be experienced as an additional punishment in prison – and was the password to the academy’s computer.
Many of the students have developed strong individual artistry, which the exhibition clearly shows in its breadth of artworks in a number of media such as installation, painting, video, drawing, sculpture, risoprint, graphics and handmade publications – spread throughout the entire first floor of Kunstnernes Hus ; lower hall, the library, the foyer, the cinema and the academy room.
Agder Art Academy is rooted in a collective artistic investigation of the potential for learning within a prison structure. The project was initiated by the curators Kristine and Thora, further developed and run with the artists Dag Erik, Hege and Sverre as well as the site manager Solfrid. Within the prison’s defined framework, the Agder Art Academy introduces art as a free space in an everyday life deprived of freedom and a tool for personal and artistic learning and development, where the concrete encounter with art and between artists and students (prisoners) takes place on the premises of art. Agder Art Academy’s activities and rationale are rooted in the conviction of art’s transcending power in the encounter with fundamental personal and socio-political boundaries. Deprivation of liberty is a socially accepted exercise of power by the state against the individual. Society’s justification for the penal institute is the preventive effect of punishment, social rehabilitation and in some cases that society needs protection. Regardless of the justification, the prison’s fundamental starting point is that people are deprived of their freedom of movement. That this is the prerequisite for the students at Agder Art Academy must not be forgotten.
