Eighteen prison workers, performed by screen actors in British television shows from the ’90s until today. The banal and omnipotent character of the carceral system, distilled into a cast of characters. An unnamed prison workplace with a burned out staff.
Sometimes watching TV is given as a reward in prison, while doing time. In the UK there’s an excess of crime dramas, reality shows and documentaries about police and prisons. Screw, Time, Clink, Bad Girls, Line of Duty.
Equally sized as paintings, seriality might give the passing evocation of monotony, of “meet-the-team” staff photos that we might see on the noticeboards of other state institutions like hospital wards, universities, medical centres and schools.
The process of painting is a performative one, where the initial task of re-casting characters doesn’t mean I settle into an imagined directors role. There’s already actor-camera-painter. The workforce re- veals itself over time and I take up various roles myself, manifesting in a variety of painterly approaches where these fictional characters are put into contact with the things in front of me. The actors are given new prison locations to influence their behaviour in partial celebration of early cinematic rear projection techniques, painted backdrops or cheaply produced green-screen.
In the studio I make conditions of temporary, self-imposed seclusion in order to produce the paintings. The TV was turned on, where an assortment of crime and prison shows—daytime reruns—were accessed with mindless ease. Porridge. Cold Case Files. Britain Behind Bars. My position as the observer of these characters disappears at the point of installation, where in parallel to a prisoner on a TV show, I don’t know who is watching around the corner, along the corridor, behind my back or in the room next to this one that I am now.
Day and night shift workers hang together. The atmosphere of constant surveillance within prisons is alluded to. The all seeing eye that I attempt to conjure with these portraits, where multiple guards are simultaneously visible, takes some influence from the architecture of the still in operation Victorian-era prisons that were designed to provide the officers with clear sight lines. In those prisons inmates can simultaneously see and be seen by officers at all times. The fantasy of extracting the in-mates from the scene and leaving the workforce to haunt/watch each other instead, is derailed by the irony that their eyes can’t see but only imply a kind of watching.
—Bod Mellor
Contact
T +49—30—26 39 76 20
F +49—30—26 39 76 229
E info(at)bortolozzi.com
Subscribe to our newsletter here →
Schöneberger Ufer 61
10785 Berlin, Germany
Directions