An Old Spanish Prison Is Now A Gorgeous Makeshift Art Museum

The cells and walls of a former prison in the Spanish city of Segovia are currently home to more than 20 art projects, including paintings, sculptures, installations, as well as film and sound pieces. Titled “Galerias,” the exhibition runs until Oct. 16.

La Cárcel, Segovia Centro de Creación (The Prison, Segovia Creation Center) once operated as the Segovia provincial jail and a central women’s prison under Franco’s dictatorship.

As visitors walk through the black iron doors of the converted prison, they encounter an installation of red, brown, yellow and blue threads woven across the railings. The splash of color in this project, titled “Tension,” is emblematic of the building’s new function.

The artworks on display do not divorce themselves from the building’s original identity, however. In various mediums, the artists showcased meditate on ideas of suffocation, isolation and resistance.

One of the larger cells in La Cárcel hosts “In rem scripta,” an installation made up of a series of painted portraits of women who lived in the prison and a sculpture of a distorted female figure partially covered in blackened bedsheets. The piece is a tribute to the hunger strikes that prisoners organized in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Scroll down for a virtual tour of the exhibition.

This post originally appeared on HuffPost Spain and has been translated into English.