Joelle Taylor on Koestler Arts: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
‘Whilst you can lock down all of our body, you can’t lock down the mind so easily’
The Koestler Awards is an annual programme set up to encourage people within the UK’s criminal justice system to explore the arts. And each year, a selection from the thousands of works created through the programme are chosen, by a guest curator, to feature in an exhibition, hosted here at the Southbank Centre. The curator of the 2023 edition of the Koestler Arts exhibition is the award-winning poet and author Joelle Taylor, who has also worked creatively in prisons for over 20 years.
Taylor has titled this year’s showcase IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, drawing on the idea of using creativity to break through the barriers that separate the people within the judicial system and their lives and their intimacies, and in this video she explains how her approach to curatorship led her to this theme. She also considers the freedom the arts offers to people who have been imprisoned or contained, and the space it can also offer for self-reflection.
‘Creative work is essential for anyone in a secure setting, because it’s freedom – freedom of your imagination’.
Joelle Taylor
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