“They had a whole army sitting on their door step in Granada, with nothing to do but grow bored. Dangerous thing, a bored army…” (Gil Vicente) and “I detest your views but am prepared to die for your right to express them…” (Voltaire) reflects the artist’s politically unbiased experience of being “imprisoned” by the police for seven and a half hours on Mayday (2001) demonstration in Oxford Circus, London. Where five disposable photographic cameras were used to document the event and the 100 photographs taken were printed, painted, and further placed inside 50 light boxes. Each light box containing two photographs/paintings (making it a two-sided light box) was sealed with black tape strips as prison bars. Along with this there is a soundtrack of the general nuisance of the day and a written text. The installation’s structure is based on Bentham’s Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher and social reformer, published his plan for the Panopticon penitentiary in 1791. Essentially, it was for a building on a semi-circular pattern (photograph’s position inside the box) with an “inspection lodge” at the centre and cells around the perimeter. The structure was accommodated in consequential installations by being displayed in the middle of a spiral staircase such as the Riverside Studios cinema stairs and at the Bethnal Green Town Hall entrance staircase.

“They had a whole army sitting on their door step in Granada, with nothing to do but grow bored. Dangerous thing, a bored army…” (Gil Vicente) and “I detest your views but am prepared to die for your right to express them…” (Voltaire) - 2001
staircase site-specific installation at the Riverside Studios “Artists in Exile” launch exhibition supported by the Arts Council
50 double-sided light boxes, soundtrack
100 hand-painted photographs
single box size 27x27x21cm

Thus, prisoners, who in the common prisons’ plan would be in individual cells, in the Panopticon were open to the gaze of the guards, or “inspectors”, but the inverse was not true due to a carefully contrived system of lighting where it was essential that the inmates were illuminated (use of light in the box) and visible to the guards. As officials were invisible to prisoners, control was maintained by the constant sense that prisoners had of being watched by unseen eyes. There was no place to hide and nowhere to be private. Not knowing whether or not they were watched, but obliged to assume that they were, obedience was the prisoner’s only rational option. The Panopticon thus offered a powerful and compelling metaphor for displaying the documented material gathered in a situation of unfair restraint and demonstrate how a sudden authoritarian abuse of power is not only unwise but also extremely damaging in an open democracy. It further questions whether military abusive behaviour based on the understanding of electronic surveillance protects civilians or on the other hand generates a prison like-society, where invisible observers track digital footprints in a panoptic environment as was mediated through the work of Michel Foucault and critics who debated it.

“They had a whole army sitting on their door step in Granada, with nothing to do but grow bored. Dangerous thing, a bored army…” (Gil Vicente) and “I detest your views but am prepared to die for your right to express them…” (Voltaire)
staircase site-specific installation at Red Bull Music Academy Showcase in Bethnal Green Town Hall, London, UK
50 double-sided light boxes, soundtrack
100 hand-painted photographs
single box size 27x27x21cm

Please note that this artwork was produced in 2001 and the artist took indiscriminate photographs of the people who were around her on that day in Oxford Circus. If however anyone depicted does not feel comfortable or simply does not want to be exposed in such a manner please do contact the artist and the photograph will be removed immediately with its due apologies. The artist would like to state that her intent was not to harm or expose anyone for she herself was also photographed not only by the police but also by the many photographers who were also on site. This however does not excuse the fact that there may be someone who was photographed by her and does not want to be exposed in such a way - if that is the case you have her apologies from the outset.