![]() ![]() New artworks by the likes of Steve McQueen, Jean-Michel Pancin, and Wolfgang Tillmans have been installed in the prison’s corridors and wings, while pieces by Vija Celmins, Rita Donagh, Peter Dreher, Félix González-Torres, Richard Hamilton, and Roni Horn are also exhibited in the cells. Reading Gaol was a working prison until 2013 this year, it opened to the public with Inside, a major new project by the art organization Artangel, inviting visual artists, writers, and performers to respond to the work of the prison’s most famous inmate. It was there, in his isolation cell, that Wilde wrote “De Profundis.” Wilde was then moved from jail to jail, his health and psyche shattered, spending the last year of his conviction at Reading Gaol in London. Down on his luck and publicly shamed, the writer was sentenced to two years of hard labor, the maximum sentence allowed. The chain of events that followed shortly after led to a series of trials culminating in Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency. Despite the disapproval of Douglas’s family, the two kept on seeing each other, until Douglas’s father accused Wilde of sodomy. The story is more or less known: In 1891, Wilde began a close and troubled friendship - soon turned into sentimental relationship - with Douglas, a handsome and capricious young aristocrat. The recipient of the writer’s most tormented and beautiful lines was his friend, lover, and ultimate reason for Wilde’s own incarceration and financial ruin: Lord Alfred Douglas, or “Bosie.” So Oscar Wilde wrote in “ De Profundis,” the 55,000-word letter composed during his imprisonment in 1897. It is always twilight in one’s cell, as it is always midnight in one’s heart. Outside the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down through the thickly-muffled glass of the small iron-barred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. ‘Inside: Artists and Writers in Reading Prison,’ installation view at HM Prison Reading, formerly known as Reading Gaol (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless otherwise noted) ![]()
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