Prisoner in the Garden

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Prisoner in the Garden is now a permanent exhibition in The Mandela Cell at Constitution Hill Museum in Johannesburg and some elements are also installed at Red Location Museum in Port Elizabeth.

This exhibition is structured as a spatial metaphor for incarceration, premised on the idea of an island prison, where the prisoner is not simply confined by bars but isolated from the world by the sea, and by multiple systems of censorship, intervention, secrecy, and lies. The self-contained exhibition has clearly delimited boundaries, and visitors are obliged to step – quite literally – into the prison world. Their entry is signalled by the sound of gravel crunching underfoot, evocative of the island and the limestone quarry. The enclosing steel mesh screens suggest the cell and its cold isolation, and yet, because the screens also allow visual access, they also signal the failure of the prison system to contain the spirit of the prisoners.

A centrally placed desk at the entrance marks bureaucratic regulation of the prison experience. The stacks of metal trunks and wooden crates in which many of the documents are exhibited convey a sense of the mass of heaped records, and evoke their crated passage to and from Robben Island.

Their new glass lids are designed to enable viewing, symbolising their latter-day transition into the public domain and their new accessibility.

Certain documents are placed in display cabinets, introducing the idea of engagement with the archive. Their multiple drawers invite viewers to interact with the display, to open and close the archive as they wish. Glass boxes elevate the principal objects for the exhibition, such as the photographic images of the ‘prisoner in the garden’.  Flickering video footage, audio, and the veiled space of the world beyond the mesh all generate a sense of uneasiness that is haunting, and evocative for the defiance and anger in the central images of Mr Mandela as the prisoner in the garden. The exhibition itself enables a powerful, visceral engagement with the archive.