Tate Liverpool has opened an incredible exhibition now the prestigious Turner Prize has returned to the city.
I always forget just how much I love art until I'm around it. The impressive Tate Liverpool occupies a sprawling plot on the famed Royal Albert Dock and this year, it's playing host to the iconic Turner Prize for the first time in 15 years.
The coveted prize was established in 1984 and, each year, it's awarded to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work. The Turner Prize is £55,000, with £25,000 going to the winner and £10,000 being awarded to each of the other shortlisted artists.
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The four artists nominated for the Turner Prize 2022 include Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Sin Wai Kin. Each artist’s multifaceted, multimedia work evokes thought, reflection and inspiration - I could have spent hours wandering through the exhibition, with each piece continually offering fresh and exciting insights.
The work is politically and socially relevant, with the exhibition offering spectators a creative and, oftentimes, bizarre medley of video, sculpture, print, photography, mechanics, media and more.
Heather Phillipson has conjured a dystopian landscape with 'RUPTURE NO 6: biting the blowtorched peach' which I found both unnerving and oddly peaceful. Phillipson treats her space at Tate Liverpool as alive and happening in a parallel time-zone. Her work merges different materials to create a vivid new landscape in what she describes as "quantum thought experiments". It’s dark and melancholy while remaining wild, intriguing and powerful.
Ingrid Pollard works primarily in photography but also sculpture, film and sound, exploring and interrogating ideas including Britishness, race and sexuality.
For the Turner Prize, Pollard presents ‘Seventeen of Sixty Eight 2018’, developed from decades of research into racist depictions of 'the African' on pub signs, objects, within literature, and in surrounding landscapes. It forces spectators and art lovers to confront such familiar images with the harrowing and raw realisation of the passive acceptance of racism that's a stain on our history.
Veronica Ryan works with cast forms in clay and bronze; sewn and tea-stained fabrics, and bright neon crocheted fishing line pouches filled with a variety of seeds, fruit stones and skins to reference displacement, fragmentation and alienation. Ryan’s ‘Multiple Conversations 2019–21’ and ‘Along a Spectrum 2021’ are open to interpretation.
The work, taking centre stage in a dreamy yellow space juxtaposes familiarity by displaying common objects and entirely reconfiguring them to evoke thought. It explores themes such as history, belonging, human psychology and collective trauma.
Sin Wai Kin explores identity, desire, consciousness and more through fantastical performances incorporating drag and moving images. For the Turner Prize, Sin presents three films, including 'A Dream of Wholeness in Parts 2021' in which traditional Chinese philosophy and dramaturgy intersects with contemporary drag, music and poetry.
In the entertaining and disarming 'It's Always You 2021', the artist adopts the roles of four boyband members, utilising multiple identities that transcend constructed binaries in a piece I found myself re-watching and re-watching on a loop. The third film, 'Today's Top Stories', Sin plays the character of The Storyteller, posing as a news anchor who recites philosophical propositions on existence, consciousness, naming and identity.
The winner of the Turner Prize will be announced on December 7 at an award ceremony at Liverpool's St George's Hall. The exhibition opens to the public on October 20.
The Tate is a beautiful, peaceful space that’s a vital part of Liverpool’s cultural identity and it's a major flex that the Turner Prize has returned for the first time in 15 years, having helped launch the city’s year as European Capital of Culture. I implore you to visit this gem of a venue and get lost in the dazzling array of artwork we’re lucky enough to have on our doorstep.
Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and co-chair of the Turner Prize 2022 jury, said: "15 years since Turner Prize ventured out of London for the first time to Liverpool, it’s fantastic to see the prize back in the city. This year's shortlisted artists have delivered a visually exciting, thought-provoking, and wide ranging exhibition, and I encourage art-lovers from across the country to come and see it for themselves."
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