Looking back to past injustice or forward to impending crisis, this year’s is a nervy, loud and unstable Prize – and troubled by a lazy habit of insider selection

After the co-winner debacle (sorry, radical egalitarian insurgency) of 2019, the COVID-enforced no-show of 2020 and the all-collectives social-practice shoulder-shrug of 2021, the Turner Prize, established to ‘promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art’, has now pivoted back to individual artists who make stuff you can look at in a gallery. Once you’re past the institutional commitment to diversity (in this instance, three artists of colour, three female artists and one artist of indefinite gender) and that the art addresses, explores or otherwise ‘deals with’ urgent topics of contemporary cultural politics (in this instance race, gender and ecological crisis), then you get to consider whether the art is good despite all the progressive discourse, or good simply because of it. And, either way, what it might say about the state of contemporary British art.

From the get-go it’s an eye-popping, sensorially engaging experience, compact and succinctly installed in a suite of rooms on Tate Liverpool’s airier top floor (the second time the prize show has fetched up in Liverpool since the Tate started touring the show fifteen years ago). Ecosystems are in your face as you enter the glowing purple-pink passageway that introduces Heather Phillipson’s installation Rupture No. 6: biting the blowtorched peach; ranks of flatscreens on either side, displaying the staring, blinking eyes of diverse beasts – slit-pupilled frogs who lick their own eyeballs, Siberian tigers, snakes and primates. Through this weirdly accusatory procession you enter a bigger space whose walls are flooded with video projections – of evolving cloud formations; of swans in flight; of a hot orange sunrise above a black sea, in which the sun appears to morph into a fiery peach. At the centre stands a corrugated iron rotunda, its door open to a sandy interior in which hang large metal gas cylinders, clanking balefully in the induced breeze. Outside stand two ridiculous revolving turbines, whose three arms have the shape of small ships’ anchors.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.