Young adults who have had a parent in prison will curate an exhibition at London’s Southbank Centre this autumn, sharing their experiences in the process.
Rock, Paper, Scissors, the latest edition of the annual Koestler Arts exhibition, will bring together more than 200 works selected from over 7,500 entries to the 2026 Koestler Awards, which recognise art made by people in prisons, secure hospitals, young offender institutions and other criminal justice settings. Entrants submit work across visual art, writing, music, film, craft and design, with awards including cash prizes, certificates and feedback from judges. Selected works are also exhibited and can be offered for sale, giving artists in custody an opportunity for their work to reach audiences outside the criminal justice system.
This year, the works have been chosen by five members of the Parental Imprisonment Collective (PIC), a group of 18 to 35-year-olds from across the UK who experienced parental imprisonment.
The curators made their selections without being given information about the artists or their circumstances. The artists will remain anonymous to visitors to, under an HMPPS policy introduced in 2023 that prevents Koestler Arts from displaying prisoners’ first names alongside their work. The subsequent anonymity policy was criticised by former Koestler exhibition curators, who argued that removing artists’ names undermined the rehabilitative value of having their work publicly recognised. HMPPS said the measure was intended to protect victims. Koestler Arts has confirmed that the policy remains in place for this year’s exhibition.
The Rock, Paper, Scissors exhibition moves through themes including childhood, family, home, confinement, imagination and landscape, with works spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, music, writing, craft and design.
“We’ve come together to curate an exhibition that charts a journey of life from childhood onwards, and the different paths a life can take,” PIC said in a statement. “We want visitors to remember that everybody in prison was once a child too. They are not just the sum of their sentence.”
Freedom is a State of Mind, HM Prison Peterborough, Sculpture (2026)
Courtesy of Koestler Arts
Fiona Curran, the chief executive of Koestler Arts says the personal experiences of the curators has been critical to forming the story the show will tell.
“The Parental Imprisonment Collective has shaped our 2026 Southbank Centre exhibition in ways curators without their background could not,” she says. “Their selection draws attention not just to what the work depicts, but to what it means to create art from within the criminal justice system. The curators were uniquely attuned to what becomes possible when art is made and shared, and to the complexity and meanings contained within the creative work being made every day in prisons across the UK.”
The exhibition’s title takes its inspiration from the familiar game, reflecting what the curators saw as the role of chance, choice and consequence in shaping lives.
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.
Mark Ball, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, said the show was timely considering the current debates about the state of the prisons in England and Wales and the growing prison population in these countries. Young adults such as those represented in Rock, Paper, Scissors, “serve a different type of sentence” when their parents are imprisoned. The Southbank Centre’s exhibition, he adds, “centres their voices and stories and offers an important discourse on imprisonment, arts and wellbeing”.
Some works will be available to buy, with donations going to Victim Support, a charity aimed at helping victims and witnesses of crime. An accompanying events programme will include Words In, Words Out, part of the London Literature Festival, exploring reading and writing in Britain’s criminal justice system.
Previous curators to the annual exhibition have included Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley, Grayson Perry, Jeremy Deller, Sarah Lucas and Benjamin Zephaniah.
Rock, Paper, Scissors will run at the Southbank Centre’s newly refurbished Undercroft space, from 16 October to 29 November. Entry is free.
