“Everybody in prison was once a child”: for the first time, young adults with experience of parental imprisonment curate Koestler Arts exhibition at Southbank Centre

Koestler Arts runs the UK’s largest awards and exhibitions programme recognising creative work by people in secure settings The Parental Imprisonment Collective brings together more than 200 artworks selected from over 7,500 entries into the exhibition: Rock, Paper, Scissors.

This autumn, Koestler Arts returns to the Southbank Centre with its annual exhibition celebrating the creativity, talent and imagination of people in criminal justice settings. Rock, Paper, Scissors opens on 16 October in the Undercroft and presents artworks submitted to the 2026 Koestler Awards, the UK’s only national arts awards programme for work made in prisons, secure hospitals, young offender institutions and by people on probation.

For the first time in the show’s history, the artworks have been selected by members of the Parental Imprisonment Collective (PIC), a group of young adults with experience of a parent in prison during childhood. PIC are supported by Young Ambassadors from Prison Advice and Care Trust (PACT), a leading charity working with children and families affected by parental imprisonment. Bringing together five different perspectives, the curators have created an exhibition that invites audiences to look beyond assumptions about imprisonment and consider the complex human stories behind the artworks. T

he 2026 exhibition follows a distinguished line of Koestler Arts guest curators. Previous curators for the exhibition have included Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley, Benjamin Zephaniah, Camille Walala, Grayson Perry, Inua Ellams, Jeremy Deller and John Costi, Lady Unchained, Sarah Lucas, and Speech Debelle.

This year’s curators hope visitors will reconsider what it means to have a parent in prison, while also recognising that people in criminal justice settings are not defined solely by their circumstances or their sentence. The exhibition highlights the complexity of individual experiences, revealing stories of creativity, imagination, humour, vulnerability and hope.