Agder Art Academy is a collective artwork in the form of a three-year art education programme in Agder Prison, Froland; a collaborative work between inmates and professional artists. It is an art education programme as public art, produced by KORO (Public Art Norway). The art academy offers a free, experimental art programme, developed and run by artists, for inmates in a maximum security prison. Following a three-year programme–involving 29 students, 20 guest teachers and a number of online lecturers–the results of the project will be featured in the exhibition Art as Punishment at Kunstnernes Hus. Serving time in a maximum security prison is an everyday that most people have no insight into. When Agder Art Academy now meets the public, a space is cracked open between the inside and the outside, giving the students' expressions a place outside the prison that they are not usually afforded. Through the exhibited artworks and the academy framework, the exhibition raises important questions regarding the freedom of expression, the relationship between state systems for art and justice, the transformative potential of art and its role in society.

Art as Punishment presents artworks created by students who have spent anything from three years to a few weeks at Agder Art Academy. In addition, professional artists have given workshops that have resulted in larger collaborative works with the students. All the artists are exhibiting under their first names, since Agder Art Academy is a collective project, and this is how the participants know each other in the academy. The title of the exhibition, Art as Punishment, was chosen by the students. The phrase has been an inside joke referring to how art can be experienced as an additional punishment in prison–it was also the password to the academy's computer.