Vita Duvan

The prison was built between 1852-1855 and opened in June 1856. Vita Duvan [The White Dove] is a nine-sided polygon with 17 cells distributed across two floors. It is Sweden’s only Panopticon, a style of prison architecture developed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century to impart a sense of invisible omnipresence. The Swedish Prison and Probation Service left the building in 1979, and since then it has been empty for a number of years. At Vita Duvan the Luleå Biennial and the Swedish Arts Council present Maria W Horn’s new sound piece Vita Duvans Lament.