From environmental issues to identity politics, the four shortlisted artists address some of the most pressing topics of our times.
Vivienne Chow
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The Turner Prize has returned to Liverpool for the first time in 15 years. Though the four shortlisted installations are like mini-retrospectives, the exhibitions this year share several themes that address pressing contemporary issues.
The showcase of Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, and Sin Wai Kin—four U.K.-based artists nominated for the coveted prize which opens to the public at Tate Liverpool on Thursday, October 20—could give the audience the impression of “an exhibition of exhibitions,” said the museum’s senior curator Sarah James. It was “a beautiful coincidence,” the curator said, that the artists’ presentations shared common ground despite their vastly different practices.
The winner will be selected by a jury on December 7, and be awarded £25,000 ($28,143)—the three runner-up artists will each receive £10,000 ($11,257). In the meantime, audiences are also asked to participate by casting their vote for their favorite artist on-site.
Turner Prize 2022: Heather Phillipson, Rupture No 6: biting the blowtorched peach. Installation view at Tate Liverpool 2022. Photo: © Tate Photography (Matt Greenwood)
James said the thematic overlaps may be “the product of this massive, collective, shared experience of the pandemic and lockdown, and the fact that maybe we’re sort of feeling slightly more solidarity than we might normally be.”
The presentation of each of the shortlisted artists—three women and one non-binary artist of diverse age ranges and cultural backgrounds—begins with the striking, mixed-media installation RUPTURE NO 6: biting the blowtorched peach (2022) by the London-born, 44-year-old Phillipson.
Turner Prize 2022: Veronica Ryan. Installation View at Tate Liverpool 2022. Photo: © Tate Photography (Sonal Bakarina)
The work is a re-imagination of her Tate Britain solo exhibition that closed in January this year, the same show that earned her the current nomination. It invites the audience into an exhibition space transformed into an otherworldly setting of sumptuous colors conjured by a series of moving image projections and installations repurposing motorized ship anchors into wind turbines and gas canisters into wind chimes. Phillipson’s imaginary world is known as a “mutated habitat” in organizers’ words, but it evokes an apocalyptic feeling.
This is juxtaposed with a serene, yellow room created by the 68-year-old Ryan. The subtle repurposing of everyday materials, from fruit to takeaway food containers, feathers, paper, or even pillows and bandages, is not just about “psychological resonance” and the “extended self,” in the artist’s words. The resulting plant-like sculptures and installation pieces relate childhood memories with distant histories of global trade, while commenting on environmental and ecological issues.
Turner Prize 2022: Ingrid Pollard. Installation view at Tate Liverpool. Photo: Vivienne Chow.
Viewers then step onto green floor, which hosts Sin’s iconic mixed-media installation work It’s Always You. Here, the 31-year-old non-binary Canadian-born artist reconstructs a boy band fantasy featuring four characters invented and played by Sin, who utilizes drag as their artistic expression.
There’s a karaoke screen, boy band dance choreography, and even autographed posters, but beneath the fantasy and the symbolic, colorful painted faces of Sin’s characters is the questioning of identity, body politics, and queer coding. Sin’s lyrical video work A Dream of Wholeness in Parts (2021), draws inspirations from Chuang Tzu’s ancient Taoist classic Dream of the Butterfly, which is also on show.
The study of body and identity politics is differently approached in the 68-year-old Pollard’s thoughtful presentation that revolves around racism within the context of British history. The show features the powerful Bow Down and Very Low – 123 (2021), which includes a set of three kinetic sculptures made with everyday objects referencing to the gesture of a young Black girl from a 1944 colonial propaganda film. Was girl bowing down or sinking into a deep curtsy? The uneasy movements of the kinetic sculptures offer interpretation from multiple perspectives.
The Turner Prize shortlist exhibition is on view at the Tate Liverpool until March 19, 2023. A winner will be chosen on December 7, 2022.
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