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Nan Goldin INSIDE Reading Prison September 7, 2016

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Metaphor Online, Nan Goldin, The Guardian , trackback

Photo William Eckersby

Nan Goldin is guiding the way through her unlikely exhibition space in Reading prison, which comprises a row of cells on C Wing, close to where, in the summer of 1895, Oscar Wilde began a two-year sentence for gross indecency following the failure of his libel case against the Marquis of Queensbury. Goldin discovered the writer at the age of 15 and he became a huge influence on her. “What I understood him to be saying is that you can be who you pretend to be,” she says. “You can remake yourself completely. That idea drove my desire to create myself though my art.”

 

 

As if to exorcise the silence and the solitude, one of Goldin’s pieces is a video interview with a 91-year-old man who is still campaigning for an apology from the government for his conviction for homosexuality 70 years ago. His posh voice booms out into the silence of the prison like an accusation. Next door are two more screens, each featuring synched videos of early silent film versions of Wilde’s play SalomeNext door again is an edited version of French writer Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant d’Amoura poetic depiction of homosexual desire in a prison. It can only be viewed though the slim, murky window in the door.

Goldin has always sided with outsiders – the drag queens, drug addicts and wayward friends whose lives are glimpsed in her groundbreakingly raw and intimate photobooks, such as The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and The Devil’s Playground.

Having just spent a few sombre minutes in C.3.3. (Wilde’s cell, though it’s now changed due to a revised numbering system), I ask Goldin if she has found it an oppressive place. “Strangely, no,” she says. “I think I’m desensitised to it. What has got to me is the fact that he spent so much time in solitary confinement with just one page of blank paper to write on a day. I cannot begin to imagine how someone as social and talkative and outgoing as him survived. It makes me angry even to think about it.”

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/sep/05/nan-goldin-oscar-wilde-inside-exhibition-reading-prison-artangel

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