The Turner prize shortlist, as jury chair and Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson rightly points out, provides an annual “snapshot of British artistic talent”. But this year, the last word you would use to describe the actual work of the four shortlisted artists is “snapshot”. Instead, they have all engaged – through a variety of approaches and mediums – with the long-term and the bigger picture, seen through remarkably wide-angled political and social lenses.
The rules of the prize have changed over the years but three of the four artists – Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Jesse Darling, all born in the 1980s – would fall under the now discontinued age limit of artists under 50; the other artist nominated this time, Barbara Walker, was born in the 1960s. Only Walker and Leung are based permanently in the UK, with Pilgrim moving between the Netherlands and Dorset, and Darling working from Berlin. The shows for which they were nominated also extend beyond the UK, with Walker’s Burden of Proof being shown at the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates and Leung’s Fountains in Copenhagen, Denmark.
