You walk into the room, and are confronted by a selection of stark poetry and prose on the walls. Then the lights go out, and an entirely new, luminous set of writings appear.  The effects is startling, disturbing, and disorientating. Lights Out is an installation created by visual artist Janetka Platun for Catching Dreams, an exhibition of prisoner arts by the Koestler Trust, at London’s Southbank Centre.

One poem on the wall says simply: “Grey walls / Reflect Winter sun / Into my cell / I find freedom.” Another one, from a secure children’s home, says: “Someone has stolen something /Warm from me / So now I am cold. / Something that fills me with / Happiness, has been stolen. / Now I am empty.”

The Koestler Trust describes itself as “the UK's best-known prison arts charity”. It has been awarding, exhibiting and selling artworks by offenders, detainees and secure patients for over 50 years. This year it received a record number of entries  –  8,789 pieces of writing, music, film, fine art and design.

Catching Dreams is the annual showcase of arts by prisoners, offenders on community sentences, secure psychiatric patients and immigrations detainees. Among the artworks on the walls at the Southbank’s Spirit Level this week is a striking, and highly commended portrait of Seamus Heaney – a detail of which is pictured here – by James, at HM Prison Maghaberry, in Northern Ireland.

This year’s show has been curated by eight former offenders who completed a year’s programme of mentoring with the Koestler Trust’s specially trained artists mentors.

Arthur Koestler, who founded the Koestler Awards in 1962, was born in Budapest, the only child of middle-class Jewish parents. In 1936, while reporting on the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested by Franco's fascists, condemned to death for espionage and spent three months in prison in Malaga and Seville. The British Foreign Office secured his release through an exchange of prisoners. In Spanish Testament (1937), Koestler described how he kept sane in his cell by teaching himself mental exercises and how he went on hunger strike to get pen and paper.

The experience turned him against “closed systems of thought”. He left the Communist party and fictionalised his reasons in Darkness at Noon (1940), whose narrator is incarcerated by the political party he has served. The Koestler awards grew out of his work to abolish hanging. His books of essays included The Ghost in the Machine (1967), which analysed the anxieties of the nuclear age. In his final years, Koestler argued for voluntary euthanasia. Aged 77, with leukaemia and Parkinson's disease, he took his own life by overdose. His third wife Cynthia, aged 55 and in good health, committed suicide with him.

The Catching Dreams exhibition is at the Royal Festival Hall’s Spirit Level on the Southbank from 24 September to 30 November. Events linked to the exhibition include a poetry workshop with Holly Hopkins, the Koestler Trust’s literature officer, on Monday 6 October. 

Greg Freeman