Solo Exhibition: Control Order House, Brighton Photo Biennial

An examination of space, control and criminalisation.

In December 2011, Edmund Clark was the first artist to be granted access to a house in which a person suspected of terrorist related activity had been placed under a Control Order.

The 2005 Prevention of Terrorism Act granted the Home Office the power to relocate any controlled person to a house in an alien town or city and impose strict conditions, similar to house-arrest. Since the Act, 48 people have been made subject to a Control Order. In these cases, the Home Office has chosen not to prosecute a controlee, nor revealed the full basis of the allegations against them, as evidence is based on intelligence sources they are unwilling to reveal publicly.

The material Clark produced has had to be screened by the Home Office and the controlled person’s lawyers. Revealing the identity of the controlled person or the location of the house would be an offence.

Edmund Clark is an award winning artist whose work explores the link between representation and politics through photography, video, found imagery and text. He is best known for his work on control and incarceration in the monographs Still Life Killing Time and Guantanamo: If The Light Goes Out.

New work experiments with how multidisciplinary collaboration and new technology can further address these themes.

Clark’s work has been acquired for national and international collections, including The National Portrait Gallery, London, The Imperial War Museum, London, The National Media Museum, Bradford.

He was awarded the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal for outstanding photography for public service in 2011.

• http://www.bpb.org.uk/2012/whats_on/edmu...
• https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...
• https://photoworks.org.uk/project-news/b...