MOON GROVE

On now

• Richard Hards’ autumn 2026 exhibition at Moon Grove brings together moving image, sound, and archival photography developed through the artist’s sustained research into the 1990 Manchester Strangeways Prison protest. Emerging from his doctoral project, ‘Reasonable men might have acted likewise’ [LINK text='[i] ' href='https://www.moongrove.org/forthcoming#_edn1'] , the show takes as its starting point a recording made during the prison’s Sunday service, immediately before the protest began. The circumstances of this document are significant. On 1 April 1990, around 300 prisoners were assembled in the Strangeways chapel for Sunday service. A visiting speaker had just delivered a sermon when a prisoner, Paul Taylor, took the microphone and began addressing the congregation. The Prison Reform Trust describes Taylor as delivering his ‘own sermon’, calling for resistance and reform, reusing words from the address to rebuke the prison system. As the service was being recorded by Rev. Noel Proctor, the prison chaplain — reportedly for distribution to a prayer group — the beginning of the disturbance was inadvertently captured. Proctor subsequently submitted the tape to the Home Office as evidence for the prosecution of protesters. Only the section considered useful as evidence survives in transcript: the choir, guest sermon and chaplain’s solo are absent. Hards has spent several years attempting to locate the soundtrack; having passed from the Home Office to the Ministry of Justice, it may remain in government storage or have been destroyed under records-retention procedures. Its existence remains uncertain. The missing tape subsequently becomes a kind of MacGuffin [LINK text='[ii] ' href='https://www.moongrove.org/forthcoming#_edn2'] for the exhibition: an absent object that remains persistently out of reach while driving Hards’ research. The artist’s search has generated an accumulation of other material – released documents, photographs, transcripts and memorabilia, alongside freedom of information requests – through which a wider history of the protest and its representation emerges. A new sound work, Strangeways Prison Chapel, April 1st 1990 (2026), situated in the living room at Moon Grove, re-enacts the surviving partial transcript through the voices of a protesting prisoner, and the Reverend and prisoners shouting elsewhere in the chapel. Rather than reconstructing the service, it draws attention to what was preserved as evidence, what was discarded and the institutional decisions that determined the difference. Elsewhere, archival press photographs are enlarged across tiled sheets; taken from outside the prison by photographers unable to enter the site, their distant viewpoints break down into grain, dots and seams. The images include men occupying the prison roof; a banner reading ‘NO DEAD’, produced while conflicting reports circulated about fatalities inside; negotiations between prisoners and officials across different areas of the prison.
  Description

  Richard Hards’ autumn 2026 exhibition

  Until 4 Dec 2026

  
  More info