An exhibition that opened this week at London's Southbank Centre reverses the usual direction of curatorial authority. More than 200 artworks submitted to the 2026 Koestler Awards, the national prize for work made in secure institutions, were chosen not by established artists but by the Parental Imprisonment Collective, a group of 18- to 35-year-olds who grew up with a parent behind bars. The show is titled 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' and runs from 16 October to 29 November.

Fiona Curran, chief executive of Koestler Arts, the charity behind the awards, said the perspective of children and families is routinely missing from conversations about imprisonment. She described the collective's lived experience as bringing 'enormous insight, sensitivity, and imagination' to the selection, which was drawn from a pool of over 7,500 entries. Past editions have been curated by figures including Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley and Sarah Lucas, as well as by women in HM Prison Downview; Curran said the power to select and interpret work should also be shared with voices that are less often heard.

The scale of the issue the show addresses is not marginal. The Ministry of Justice estimates that 193,000 children in England and Wales — one child in every two primary-school classes — have a parent or carer in custody. 'We also want visitors to remember that everybody in prison was once a child too,' the curators said. 'They are not just the sum of their sentence.'

The selection moves between humour and vulnerability: a matchstick model of a mackerel inmate inside a tin-can cell sits alongside a landscape glimpsed through the bars of a cage. The show's title comes from the game of chance, reflecting both the role of luck in life outcomes and the range of materials the entrants worked with. For people in secure settings, Curran noted, creativity communicates ideas that ordinary conversation cannot — and statistics can never convey what separation from family actually feels like.