A Journey To Freedom

Under the direction of Swiss curator Barbara Polla, this collection includes film, mixed media, sculpture, photography and a virtual reality experience exploring incarceration through the works of 13 contemporary international artists. In developing the concept for this exhibition Polla commented that "imprisonment and freedom are two faces of a double sword. Any exploration of imprisonment is, by itself, a journey to freedom".

The exhibition tackles its subject matter head-on, exploring physical confinement in Tasmania's colonial history through to the brutal reality and banality of detention centre life. It questions the morality and openly looks at coping mechanisms and the psychological impact of locking a person up.

Kudos is given to Tasmanian local, documentary photographer Ricky Maynard, with the brave placement of his works at the start of the exhibition. The black and white images present with blunt honesty the impact of incarceration of Indigenous prisoners, borrowed from his 1993 series, No More Than What You See.

Several works have been created on site for the exhibition, Australian artist Sam Wallman has contributed a bold bright wall of Mambo-style drawings. French artists Rachel Labastie and Nicolas Daubanes have respectively produced Axes and A Journey To Freedom from clay, sand and straw; and Untitled, a depiction of Port Arthur's Isle of the Dead, with iron fillings representative of the bars that held the prisoners.

Set apart from the main exhibition space, in the claustrophobic dirt-floored basement of the gallery, a series of short videos Ten Years In Jail, 2010-2015 by Jhafis Quintero is a moving account of a person surviving extreme solitude and deprivation.

A whimsical addition to the exhibition is a virtual reality experience Orbital Vanitas by artist Shaun Gladwell. Floating above the Earth, it perhaps offers another perspective on the idea of being confined to space. 

All in all, a very moving and thought-provoking exhibition, and a valuable contribution to the program of Dark Mofo.