December 6, 2017 – March 11, 2018
Edmund Clark has been Ikon’s artist-in-residence (2014-17) at Britain’s only therapeutic prison, HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire. An artist with a longstanding interest in the incarceration and its effects, this exhibition showcases the body of work he has developed in response to the prison and helping to facilitate the prisoners’ own creative output. The work explores HMP Grendon as an environment and a process, as well as a place of incarceration, which is the result of Clark’s familiarity and engagement with the prisoners, prison officers and staff’s daily routine. The works raise important questions about ideas of representation, self-image, trauma and panopticism.
Flowers Gallery, New York, USA
January 27 – March 3, 2018
The Mountains of Majeed is a reflection on the end of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan through photography, found imagery and Taliban poetry. Based at Bagram Airfield, the largest American base in Afghanistan, and formerly home to 40,000, Edmund Clark examines the experience of the vast majority of military personnel and contractors who have serviced Enduring Freedom without ever leaving the base. Clark distills their war down to a concise series of photographs of the two views they have of Afghanistan: what they experience of the country over the walls or through the wire of their bases, and what they see through pictorial representations within these enclaves of high technology and occupation.