What a good Turner prize shortlist this is. With artists engaging in photography, sculpture, moving image, installation, performance, sound and the spoken word, what immediately strikes me, as well as their variety, are the thematic crossovers between them. One can speak about the legacies of colonialism and migration that recur in the life histories and the art of both Ingrid Pollard and Veronica Ryan, who both came to the UK from the Caribbean as children in the 1950s, and of the questioning of identity and place in both their works and that of non-binary artist Sin Wai Kin (brought up in Toronto with a Hong Kong Chinese father and an English mother).
The ongoing environmental crisis and our relationships to the natural world are, in different ways, persistent themes across the shortlist, as are questions of identity and belonging. Our relationship to both history and place (and the histories of places) crops up again and again. So, too, does a sense of a morphing between genres and categories. Pollard has discussed her own work as a kind of mashup, while Sin talks about “blowing up categories” in their drag performances, which involve a kind of slippage between performances of a kind of exaggerated, parodic femininity and the creation of a kind of mythological sculpting of the self.
