Heterotopic Heritage in Hong Kong: Tai Kwun and Neo-Victorian Carceral Space

The prison is specifically identified by Michel Foucault in his essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967), as an exemplar of “heterotopias of deviation”. Reified in neo-Victorian production as a hegemonic space to be resisted, within which illicit desire, feminist politics, and alternate narratives, for example, flourish under harsh panoptic conditions, the prison nonetheless emerges as a counter-site to both nineteenth-century and contemporary social life. This article investigates the neo-Victorian prison museum that embodies several of Foucault’s heterotopic principles and traits from heterochronia to the dynamics of illusion, compensation/exclusion and inclusion that structure the relationship of heterotopic space to all space. Specifically, I explore the heritage site of the Central Police Station compound in Hong Kong, recently transformed into “Tai Kwun: the Centre for Heritage and the Arts”. Tai Kwun (“Big Station” in Cantonese) combines Victorian and contemporary architecture, carceral space, contemporary art, and postcolonial history to herald the transformation of Hong Kong into an international arts hub. Tai Kwun is an impressive example of neo-Victorian adaptive reuse, but its current status as a former prison, art museum, and heritage space complicates the celebratory aspects of heterotopia as counter-site. Instead, Tai Kwun’s spatial, historical, and financial arrangements emphasize the challenges that tourism, government funding, heritage, and the art industry pose for Foucault’s original definition of heterotopia and our conception of the politics of neo-Victorianism in the present.

Prison art programs: Art, culture and human rights for Indigenous prisoners

This article argues that prison art programs are central to the human rights of Indigenous detainees. It examines how these programs are most commonly understood in terms of their rehabilitative value, an approach which fails to fully capture the right of Indigenous detainees to participation in them. It argues that a human rights framework should be applied to prison art programs. This recognises the pivotal role art programs play in realising a multitude of interconnected rights, upholds the voices of Indigenous prisoners and emphasises the crucial place of self-determination in the design, delivery and ultimate success of programs.

Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368–1644)

Approaching the prison as a creative environment and imprisoned officials as creative subjects in Ming China (1368–1644), Ying Zhang introduces a few important themes at the intersection of premodern Chinese religion, poetry, and visual and material culture. The Ming is known for its extraordinary cultural and economic accomplishments in the increasingly globalized early modern world. For scholars of Chinese religion and art, this era crystallizes the essential and enduring characteristics in these two spheres. Drawing on scholarship on Chinese philosophy, religion, aesthetics, poetry, music, and visual and material culture, Zhang illustrates how the prisoners understood their environment as creative and engaged it creatively. She then offers a literature survey on the characteristics of premodern Chinese religion and art that helps situate the questions of “creative environment” and “creative subject” within multiple fields of scholarship.

Die Praxis der bedingten Entlassung aus dem Strafvollzug

The decision on conditional release from prison (Art. 86 89 SCC) is one ofthe most important decisions in the Swiss criminal justice system. At stakeare both the freedom of the convicted person, who is to be given a chance ofreintegration by the conditional release, and the security of the general public, which must be protected against the commission of further criminal offences.Despite its significance forconvicted persons and the society as a whole, thepractice of conditional release is scarcely discussed in Swiss literature: Whatis the procedure for conditional release? How do the opinions of the parties involved in the procedure influence its outcome? How do the persons responsible for conditional release exercise the discretion left to them by the law? The clarification of these issues seems all the more important giventhat in recent decades the number of conditional release decisions has decreased and there are considerable cantonal differences.The focus of the work is on the process of decision-making by the responsible authorities in Switzerland, in particular the implementation of theright to be heard, as well as the criteria which influence the decision on theconditional release of offenders. The research is based on a representativesample of 943 criminal files from the cantons of Berne, Fribourg, Lucerneand Vaud, which are evaluated using statistical methods (logisticregression).The results of the investigation show that the responsible authorities selectonly a few aspects from a large number of case characteristics that largelydetermine their decision-making process. The decision is strongly influenced by the residency status of the convicted person, his criminal record and theopinion of the prison authorities. The legal prognosis is therefore primarilybased on static factors from the past, whereas dynamic factors which theconvicted person or the involved actors could influence are more secondary.In addition, it emerges that the temporal and cantonal differences in the release rates do not relate to a differing prison population, as it most often assumed, but to a different way of implementing the law and appreciating theprofile of prisoners following a more restrictive or liberal understandingand practice of the release decision depending on time and canton.The study shows as well that there is no uniform practice for the procedure:the use of risk assessment tools, the opinions of the prison management or the organisation of the right to be heard are extremely disparate and therefore the right of the sentenced person to an equal and fair trial is not guaranteed to the same extent everywhere.The work concludes with a legal classification of the findings as well as withcriminal policy considerations and proposals for a more precise reformulation of Art. 86 SCC. These should contribute to a more harmonious and broader application across cantonal borders and therefore strengthen conditional release as an efficient instrument of crime prevention.

Ethnography of Prison According to Parajanov

In the article, the prison period of Sergei Parajanov’s art is examined – Parajanov served his sentence in 1973–1977 in the high security camps in Ukraine. Following the graphic works, collages and film scenarios which he created in the prison, one can conceive of the everyday life in the Soviet prison of 1970s –1980s, more than that, get an outline of the ethnography of the Soviet prison. Parajanov often uses ethnographic realities and attributes in his movies, some of these movies are even considered to be a specific variety of ethnographic cinema. However, there is an opinion that the film director, while reflecting ethnographic realities, no less created pseudoethnographic ones. In this regard, his works of the prison period are something different from the usual Parajanovian fantasies. Unlike the authors who studied the ethnography of the prison, even those who relied on their own experience (for example, L. Samoilov), Parajanov created a significant part of his works of prison content in the camp, like an ethnographer in the field, although there are also works that he created or supplemented after prison, again like an ethnographer, relying on his field notes. In other words, his works of the prison period are much closer to the genre of ethnography than his “ethnographic” films. The article also discusses the problem of the representation of Parajanov’s works of the prison period in the museums. Are they samples of prison art, a representation of a certain period in the author’s biography, or a kind of the prison ethnography?