Turner Prize

The Turner Prize is the UK’s most prestigious art award and is awarded annually to a British artist under the age of fifty. This year's Turner Prize has doubled in prize money. The winner will be awarded £40,0OO.
What happened one might wonder? It is but a question of sponsorship. This year's Turner Prize is brought to you by Gordon's, the well known manufacturers of Gin.
Will that stop the champagne from flowing at the award ceremony on the 6th of December 2004 which will be broadcasted live on Channel Four at 20:00? Watch and see.
The exhibition is on at Tate Britain until the 23rd of December, the entrance fee is £4.50.
Four artists have been shorlisted for the award and they are described as follows on the Tate Britain:
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- KUTLUG ATAMAN (born 1961)
Kutlug Ataman’s work is poised on the boundary between documentary and fiction. It uses storytelling to explore the fragility of personal identity; his subjects are individuals who have become dislocated from conventional social categories and feel compelled to re-invent themselves.

Kutlug first rose to prominence with video-works such as Women Who Wear Wigs 1999, which shows the strategies adopted by four women who change their outward appearance as a defensive and assertive response to external oppression. Ataman believes that, ‘Identity is not something that you possess, but something that you wear’ and this principle underlies much of his work. His films reveal the complex texture of memory and imagination, truth and fantasy, which composes our understanding of everyday life. They are deliberately modest in technique, retaining the immediacy of home movies despite being presented as multi-screen, multi-layered installations.

Ataman’s new work Twelve 2004 shows six individuals recounting their experience of reincarnation. It was filmed in south-east Turkey, near the border with Syria, in an Arab community trying to make sense of horrific loss. They accept as a fact that everyone is reborn, although only those who have suffered violent or untimely death remember their past lives.

Ataman’s films reveal that all documentary is a narrative and that all narratives are constructed: ‘All narratives, hence all lives, are in the end created as art by the subject’. Twelve exposes the mechanisms of language and its limitations. As the storytellers talk about their past and present lives they move between ‘then’ and ‘now’, and their narratives become confused. As language becomes insufficient, our notion of reality is modified or even made irrelevant because, Ataman believes, ‘in a strange way that reality is in fact a fiction’.

- JEREMY DELLER (born 1966)
He is perhaps best-known for The Battle of Orgreave, ‘a piece of living history’ which was a commissioned by Art Angel in 2001. This work brought together veteran miners and members of historical re-enactment societies who restaged the controversial clash between miners and the police during 1984-5. This collaboration resulted in a film, a book and an audio recording, which all function to resurrect the raw emotions from the period and provide a fresh account of events that have been distorted by the media.

Deller’s recent projects have explored the cultural landscape of specific places. In A Social Parade he celebrated the diversity of San Sebastian in Spain by inviting a cross-section of the city’s social groups to form a parade along the central boulevard. His film Memory Bucket 2003 uses documentary techniques to explore the state of Texas, focusing on two politically charged locations: the site of the Branch Davidian siege in Waco and President Bush’s home town of Crawford. Archive news footage is collaged with interviews, juxtaposing official reports with personal narratives.

Deller has also consistently explored the cultural and political heritage of Britain. For his new series of photographs, he has made and commissioned a variety of memorials to key individuals and events in recent history, including an official bench near Beatles' manager Brian Epstein’s house in Belgravia, and a road sign to commemorate the death of a cyclist.

- BEN LANGLANDS (born 1955) & NIKKI BELL (born 1959)
Langlands & Bell have recently gained recognition for a diverse collection of work shown in The House of Osama Bin Laden, a project commissioned and shown at the Imperial War Museum. In October 2002, they visited Afghanistan for two intense weeks where they investigated the aftermath of war in the twenty-first century. The lack of military presence in the resulting works is conspicuous. The focus instead is on what happens once the international forces and the world's media move on. Responding instinctively to the post-war environment, Langlands and Bell explore the ubiquitous nature of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) operating in Afghanistan. Their interactive animation investigates their dangerous expedition to the eerie isolated house occupied by Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s.

In an accompanying work, acronyms for NGOs are presented as eloquent digital sequences that multiply, transform and dissolve into each other. Formally and conceptually, this piece relates closely to an earlier work, Frozen Sky 1999, a digitally-controlled neon sculpture that randomly links abbreviations of airports from around the world. In both of these pieces, the strange language of acronyms becomes a new form of concrete poetry, as well as an important political commentary.

Creating work in response to living history is possibly the greatest challenge for an artist, and one of undeniable responsibility. Langlands & Bell work in an intelligent, but ultimately impartial, style that allows viewers the space to contemplate the complex themes explored. The poignant ambiguity of these works ultimately reflects the stark realities of war.

- YINKA SHONIBARE (born 1962)
He is best known for his use of colourful batik fabric, which he buys from Brixton market. Labelled as ‘African’, the fabric actually originates from Indonesia; it was introduced to Africa by British manufacturers via Dutch colonisers in the nineteenth century. Shonibare uses the fabric as a metaphor to address issues of origin and authenticity and to challenge straightforward readings of his work.

In Maxa 2003, Shonibare substitutes the canvas for small regimented circles of ‘African’ fabric that are decorated on the front and sides like icing on a cake. These perfect circular forms create visual chaos and offer a political challenge to ideas about taste. The problematic history of the fabric undercuts the visual pleasure of the patterns as the work becomes a metaphor for excess and exploitation. Shonibare creates ‘high’ art from commonplace cloth, asking us to consider the excesses of commercial decadence and its relationship with third-world exploitation.

The Swing (after Fragonard) 2001 re-presents a celebrated eighteenth-century painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard of a young woman kicking out her legs from underneath a froth of petticoats while lounging on a swing. Luxury, wealth and frivolity are symbolised through dress, though fabric branded with a modern commercial logo supplies a humorous twist.

Un Ballo in Maschera (a Masked Ball) 2004 is Shonibare's first film. It presents the assassination of King Gustav III of Sweden in 1792 through the medium of dance. Costume highlights ambiguities of identity and gender, while the lack of dialogue and repetition of the action ask us to consider the conventions of narrative and the structure of film.
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All of these artists are presenting video pieces. I did not get the chance of seeing the works entirely (although I did come back for Deller's film Memory Bucket which I took from the beginning hoping to see it through. Unfortunately there was a power cut after 5 minutes and the screen never came back on) yet managed to have a good idea of their intent. Here is how it would go in my opinion:
Jonathan Jones, of the Guardian, wrote an article entitled "I love Jeremy Deller". He gives up on objectivity straight away because he has a point to make about Deller's work. I think he may be right in a way. Jeremy Deller as done a lot of interesting works in the past few years and many think it is time for him to be commemorated through the Turner Prize. Jeremy Deller is exhibited in the first of the four rooms, with a lot of space to welcome his three pieces and a table in the centre of the rooms enables visitors to read books related to the themes inMemory Bucket. The millions of bats flying in the Texan air at the end of this film is a splendid and memorable image. I am also in awe of one of his previous projects Acid Brass, where he had a brass orchestra play Acid House music. I heard some of it and found it astounding (I am not being objective either, I nearly cried every time I saw Mark Herman's 1996 Brassed Off). #1
I found the work of Shonibare very powerful in the way he blended western art and african culture, especially in his video piece, which stages dancers performing in a renaissance setting. The film is played forwards, then backwards and then starts again. The sound is limited to the movements of the dancers bodies and their breath. I was hypnotised. #1,5
Ataman's work is about identity. 6 screens are showing 6 people who believe they have been reincarnated. Their self is split between the dead person and the living that they are. The way the work is set is maybe negatively interactive, it is difficult for the audience to move around the room without cutting the flow of the images. Thus one can difficultly follow everything that is said. The films are very modest in technique, you have 6 straightforward portraits of people filmed by a hand held camera. It is a charming piece of work nevertheless. #3
Langland and Bell made a very political work about the afterwar Afghanistan. They have reconstructed Bin Laden's hidind place with 3D graffics and the public can use a joystick in front of the screen to move around. On the whole, it is a bit to Counter-Strikesque. Was that there point? They also play around the acronyms of the humanitarian NGOs present by hundreds in Afghanistan. This work was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum. Yet after Michael Moore's success at the Cannes Festival, maybe it is time art regained its standing... #4