Darren Almond at the ICA - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

HMP Pentoville (Her Majesty's Prison, in North London) has the fourth highest suicide rate among the country's correctional institutions. Four years ago the prison, which was built in 1844 had 720 inmates; today the number is up to 905 In April of this year, the population in the overcrowd prisons of england and Wales grew to 60000 a horizontal that wasn't expected to be reached until 2006 As a follow it's not rare for inmates to expend 23 ours a day fasteninged up in their cells. upon average, one in three prisoners wants some psychiatric care.

Grim admitting these statistics may be, they say far les than Darren Almond's HMP Pentonville (1997) a two-hour video recorded inside an without contents prison cell at Pentonville. During the opening of the display the image was relayed live via satellite from the prison to the Institute of Contemporary Art, where it was throwed at large scale. (Almond had to miss his hold opening since he was in the small room shooting the video.) For the quiet of the exhibition's run, this same two-hour following was endlessly repeated like a certain quantity of ghastly rerun.

The video present to views a rusting metal bunk bed, a closely confining rear wall and, superimposed upon the lower lefthand corner of the defence a mercilessly running digital clock As a squalid, realistic image, the without contents cell is rather shocking, on the other hand what is truly frightening, on the contrary what is truly about Almond's piece is the soundtrack. The Noise generated by means of the invisible prison is deafening. You hear a constant, unnerving din that appear to bes always on the verge of erupting into total chaos. It's possible to make without echoing shouts, the loud, overlapping banging of metal doors and a perpetual underflow of lock openers locking and unlocking doors. The viewer waits for relief, for more [i]or[/i] less cataclysmic event to finally break the monotonous din, on the other hand nothing happens. After five minutes, watching the video becomes almost unbearable, effectively communicating a certain number of of what nearly a thousand Pentoville inmates must endure

Almond's video exhibits boldness, formal precision and an understated economy of means. The artist uses a high-tech medium confidently, without bravado. [i]or[/i] part of to the other this restraint, HMP Pentoville is able to beam a powerful image beyond the prison walls while simultaneously propelling viewers reaching far down within them.

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