One of the greatest love letters ever written, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis was the only work that the Irish writer completed during his two-year imprisonment. Now, 125 years after Wilde’s death, MoLI is proud to present a new film installation rediscovering this moving and richly layered text – perhaps the most raw and honest version of Wilde available to us, at times deeply philosophical, at times white with rage, at times heartbreakingly tender.
Addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas – or Bosie – whose presence in Wilde’s life was the catalyst for his incarceration for ‘gross indecency’, De Profundis shows a less visible side to Wilde’s writing and personality. Most of what we experience and know of Wilde is his wit and humour, his sharpness, his flamboyance, his virtuosic command of the English language. De Profundisshows us the serious artist, the thinker, the philosopher, the sensitive and profound aesthete that lives in his prose and poetry.
A fresh perspective on Wilde’s brilliant mind and tragic life, MoLI’s De Profundis installation presents key passages of the text through the voices of a contemporary community of LGBTQ+ writers, artists and activists. Here, we are immersed deep in Oscar Wilde’s own psychological struggle, his working through sorrow, his feelings of betrayal, his wide-angled lens on his own condition, his aesthetic and spiritual worldview and, despite everything, his enduring affection for Bosie.
