Young Adults Who Had a Parent in Prison to Curate Southbank Centre Exhibition of Art From Criminal Justice Settings
Five young adults who experienced having a parent in prison will curate an exhibition of art made inside criminal justice settings at the Southbank Centre in London this autumn. The show, titled Rock, Paper, Scissors, runs from Friday 16 October to Sunday 29 November 2026 and brings together more than 200 works selected from over 7,500 entries to the 2026 Koestler Awards (The Art Newspaper).
Koestler Arts, the charity behind the annual awards, describes the exhibition as showcasing the artistic range and talent of people in prisons, secure hospitals, young offender institutions and other criminal justice settings across the UK. Entries span visual art, writing, music, film, craft and design (Southbank Centre). The charity's chief executive is Fiona Curran. Mark Ball is the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, the arts complex on the South Bank of the Thames that is hosting the show.
The five curators are members of the Parental Imprisonment Collective, or PIC, a group of 18 to 35-year-olds from across the UK who each had a parent in prison. They chose every work in the exhibition without being told who made it or under what circumstances. The artists themselves remain anonymous to visitors, under a policy introduced in 2023 by His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service — the arm of government that runs England and Wales's prisons — which prevents Koestler Arts from displaying prisoners' first names alongside their work (The Art Newspaper).
The exhibition moves through themes of childhood, family, home, confinement, imagination and landscape, with works spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, music, writing, craft and design. Visitors will see paintings and drawings alongside sculpture, textiles and sound — a cross-section of what people produce when given materials and time inside.
The scale of the experience the curators share is quietly enormous. Around 193,000 children in England and Wales were estimated to have had a parent in prison during a one-year period between 2021 and 2022, according to Ministry of Justice statistics cited by The Art Newspaper. That figure places parental imprisonment among the most common adverse childhood experiences in the country, though it rarely surfaces in public discussion.
Koestler Arts has run its awards programme since 1962, when the Hungarian-British philosopher and journalist Arthur Koestler established a trust to encourage creativity among people in custody. The annual exhibition at the Southbank Centre has become a fixture of the venue's autumn calendar, with a different guest curator or curating group each year.
What sets this edition apart is the chain of experience connecting curator and artist. The people choosing what goes on the wall have lived on the other side of the prison wall — as children of someone inside — and the people whose work they are choosing are themselves inside, unnamed and unseen. The exhibition does not pair them directly. But the selection process, blind by policy, lets a shared understanding of confinement and family separation shape what visitors encounter, without either side knowing the other's identity.
