Nine inmates from the Sud Francilien Penitentiary Center, an hour's drive from Paris, have spent more than a year selecting paintings, photographs and sculptures from Parisian museum collections to be exhibited for prisoners and their families.
The exhibition is entitled "Journey", a provocative but deliberate choice explains Djamal, one of the convicts turned curator. Djamal describes the steps towards the exhibit, "Every Wednesday afternoon when we got together to prepare the exhibition, we left these walls. We discovered new places, we discovered Asia, Oceania, some Oceanic islands, we discovered lots of painters and sculptors."
While the works on loan will be released when the exhibition closes November 17, prison officials say they are open to the possiblity of inmates planning new shows in the future.
