Belmarsh Live
“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”
Nina Simone
This question by Nina Simone has echoed through every step of my path as an artist. For me, it is not rhetorical — it is a demand. A call to responsibility. Art, in its deepest form, is not decoration. It is resistance, it is memory, it is the mirror we hold up to power and silence alike. To make art in times of injustice means to take a side. Not in words alone, but in form, in presence, and in where and how we show up.
**Belmarsh Live** is exactly that: an act of artistic presence.
It is not a performance.
It is space. A Witness.
A room you can walk into — and feel the weight of the world outside it.
Between **October 2022 and June 2024**, this touring installation accompanied the global movement to free Julian Assange. From city streets to galleries, from vigils to cultural institutions — including a powerful presence at the **Council of Europe in Strasbourg** — *Belmarsh Live* made absence visible.
Inspired by the interior of Julians prison cell at **Belmarsh High Security Prison**, the installation offered visitors a moment of radical reality: one bed, one table one chair a metal toillett , four walls and the horrifying noice of a prison. No speeches. No performance. Just the architecture of isolation — and the chance to sit, to feel, to remember, to act.
This work emerged not from the art world’s demand, but from the ground: from the solidarity vigils, from my own lived engagement with grassroots justice work, and from the deep need to use artistic tools to say what must be said. I didn’t start out to create an artwork. I stood in silence holding a sign. But slowly, the form emerged.
*Belmarsh Live* became a bridge — between art and activism, between the unseen world of political imprisonment and the public imagination. It asked people not just to think, but to **feel**. And through its journey, it gathered resonance and resistance.
In 2024, the installation was featured in the **documentary by Can Dündar**, *“Julian Assange and the Dark Secrets of War,”* amplifying its message to an international audience. It toured continuously for almost two years, carried by volunteers, exhibited in cities across Europe, and grounded in the belief that **political art matters**.
When Julian Assange was released in **June 2024**, *Belmarsh Live* came to a quiet pause. But the work lives on — as a record, as a memory, and as a statement:
We must not forget those who risk everything for the truth.
We must not allow silence to become normal.
And we must never separate art from the world it lives in.
For me, art is not escape. It’s entry.
Into history, into accountability, into compassion.
**Belmarsh Live** is one chapter of that journey.
