Captive Performativities: Art and Body in the Carceral Context

This presentation explores the intersection of performance art and carceral spaces, focusing on the role of the body and spatiality in addressing the criminal justice system and its contemporary global apparatuses, including policing, surveillance, and institutional punishment – a.k.a. incarceration. While punitive regimes have predominantly garnered attention from prison abolition activists, artists have also addressed issues like mass incarceration, socio-political identity divisions, and carceral capitalism, which disproportionately impact racial minorities, marginalized groups, and LGBTQIA+ individuals. Drawing from personal practice and contemporary examples, this text examines how performance art critiques systemic surveillance, hypervisibility, and the invisibility of prisons and prisoners. It categorises artistic interventions into four approaches: From Outside to Outside, showcasing external narratives on incarceration (1); From Inside to Outside, amplifying the voices of incarcerated individuals (2); From Outside to Inside, reclaiming former prisons as sites of memory and justice-making (3); and From/To Inside-out, navigating blurred boundaries in occupied territories (4). By interrogating “penal spectatorship,” systemic power structures and “carceral aesthetics,” it positions performance art as a potent medium for disrupting the carceral continuum and fostering justice-oriented imaginaries. It argues that such art transforms confinement into an embodied critique, exposing the performative boundaries of power and amplifying abolitionist and anti-colonial calls for systemic change.