The Strength and Vulnerability Bunker

The Strength & Vulnerability Bunker is the UK's annual national showcase of arts by prisoners, offenders on community sentences, secure psychiatric patients and immigration detainees. It is the sixth exhibition in an ongoing partnership between the Koestler Trust and Southbank Centre.

This year's exhibition invites you to enter an atmospheric bunker, filled with images, objects, sounds and films that reveal personal reflections, regrets and hopes. Mercury Prize-winning rapper Speech Debelle has selected artwork, which she feels should be preserved as testament to the importance of human creation, from the thousands of entries to the 2013 Koestler Awards.

For the first time, ex-offenders will be employed as exhibition hosts, working alongside Southbank Centre staff to invigilate the exhibition and welcome visitors throughout the ten-week run. As well as impacting on the individual participants' skills and experience, this ground-breaking employment project will give an unprecedented public profile to the value of education and employment opportunities for people in the criminal justice system. Visitors will be able to hear first-hand how the arts reflect, and enrich, thousands of people's lives each year.