Review of Turner Prize 2022 at Tate Liverpool

Charu Vallabhbhai

In December 2022, Veronica Ryan, the Montserrat-born British sculptor based between Bristol and New York, was announced the winner of the 2022 Turner Prize. A free exhibition of all four shortlisted artists’ work is on show at Tate Liverpool until 19 March 2023. Following is a review of the exhibition which includes extensive installations from Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard and Sin Wai Kin alongside Ryan, by writer and curator Charu Vallabhbhai.

On a wet day between Christmas and New Year, I saw the Turner Prize at Tate Liverpool, already knowing which of the nominated artists, Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Sin Wai Kin had won. The award was presented by Holly Johnson, former singer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, earlier in December. Celebrity and infamy have long been associated with the Turner Prize. 

Not long after arriving in Liverpool the sun appears. I feel it’s going to be a good day. I have four exhibitions that present work by the Turner Prize nominees and a show of paintings by JWM Turner himself to see. During Turner’s era, the beginnings of mass industrialisation, he couldn’t have predicted the current state of environmental threat to our biodiverse planet, an issue that Heather Phillipson addresses in immersive visual technicolour. 

Nominated for her solo exhibition Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain and her fourth plinth commission THE END presented in Trafalgar Square (2020-2022), Phillipson’s Turner Prize installation is the first exhibition that visitors encounter on exiting the introductory space. There the history of the Turner Prize is given alongside short films in which each nominated artist talks about their practice.

As the visitor navigates the exhibition, the effect of moving from visually and aurally louder spaces to quieter ones is revealed to be a disservice to Ryan and Pollard, whose exhibitions are approached after experiencing strident multi-sensory stimuli. Ryan’s space in particular is flanked by Phillipson’s vision of earthly apocalypse offering a warning of the state of imbalance forced by man’s technological advances onto the natural world, and Sin Wai Kin’s imagined universe, populated by a highly mediated, manufactured pop-band.

Phillipson’s Turner Prize installation is a second iteration of her 2021 Duveen’s Commission presented in the much smaller spaces of Tate Liverpool, abridged in form but no less potent in its message. Here, Phillipson demonstrates her ability to adapt, in scale, her monumental creation for Tate Britain. On seeing the Duveen’s Commission, I was awestruck at Phillipson’s transformation of the 300ft neo-classical Galleries. These spaces, created with the intention of presenting sculpture, were unrecognisable to such extent I felt as if I had traversed through a portal into an abandoned 20th century sci-fi film set, left with the theatrical effects still running after all the crew had gone home. Phillipson has taken command of the various media she works in from moving image for flat screen or immersive projection to the robust materials required for a public sculpture and sound for audio which resonates with her methods of production, stating:

            ‘I think of my works as all kinds of compositions because music is, perhaps, the most fundamental part of my palette… often I need to sound out the tone of the room before I start to dream into it, like hearing music in my head, it’s like my eyes also become ears and my feet also become ears and maybe my whole body is ears.’

Leaving the multi-sensory feast of Phillipson’s exhibition and entering Veronica Ryan’s space, it’s tempting to turn left towards the draw of more bright colours, with sound and moving image in Sin Wai Kin’s contributing exhibition. Ryan’s work is far more demanding on its audience and can only really reward those who spend time to adjust and acclimatise to a more traditional exhibition comprising a body of work connected to her solo show Along a Spectrum at Spike Island in Bristol. Ryan was nominated for this, together with her public realm commissions for Hackney Council on the subject of Windrush, now permanently installed on Mare Street in East London.

The film about Ryan’s work in the exhibition’s introductory section shows close-up shots allowing detail to be seen in the objects she creates, in various materials including bronze, butterbeans, grapefruit skins, doilies and plaster casts. The lucidity in which these objects have been filmed, often in close-up, contrasts heavily with the presentation of Ryan’s exhibition in which the visitor is kept detached, unable to get close and look at the real-life intricate minutiae resulting from Ryan’s artisan approach to construction and assembly. The distance of a uniform platform of bright yellow plinths evokes the experience of seeing cultural objects, such as the Mona Lisa or the crown jewels, behind protective barriers or glass that accentuates their innate status and value.

Perhaps inadvertently, Ryan has elevated her created objects, made by fusing different production methods – casting, sewing and crochet, with manufactured vegetable and food trays used to transport fruit over distance by air and sea, dried flowers and other found items as well as dust and detritus. Her sculptures hold the same standing as precious treasures kept safe in museums. ‘I’m really interested in contradiction and paradox and how that speaks to our wider culture,’ Ryan explains. 

Ryan’s compulsion to pass her time creatively is inherited from her mother, whom she has always known to embroider and sew. Considered a domestic activity, Ryan admits that in wanting to ‘get on with things’, she seeks out a degree of privacy on public transport in order to keep working with a needle or crochet hook whilst journeying. Ryan’s childhood experiences, like shopping in Ridley Road Market with her mum, inform much of her work, including the outdoor commissions for Hackney of which she states: ‘It’s interesting that I’ve chosen those particular fruit and veg because it’s what my mother ate when she was pregnant with me. I like the idea that I might have internalised these particular soursop, custard apple and breadfruit.’  Her sculptures address notions of ‘…nurture and healing…’ and of ‘…mother and daughter… relationships’.

Over her career, Ryan has created a narrative that can be recognised as one single linear progression with themes, including those of diasporic voyages, cultural and intergenerational exchange, that weave in and out of prominence along the main thread. 

Leaving Ryan’s worldly stories, rooted in lived experience, I enter Sin Wai Kin’s fantasy realm ‘using speculative fiction…’ [stories that take place beyond our known world] ‘…to deconstruct and reconstruct social narratives.’

The space I walk into is visually compelling, reminiscent of the fantasy locations of MGM and Warner Brothers films The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. It is hard not to be drawn into the narrative of Wai Kin’s boy-band installation by its slick, accomplished production, including its selection and breadth of vivid colour. I feel I have entered a sweet shop with heart-throb flavours, created for hormonal teenagers craving someone to love in the place of sugar. Wai Kin is critiquing the sale of a fiction constructed for financial gain, the example here being the record company.

In a different century and context George Michael also did this with the actual pop video to his 1990 single Freedom in which five supermodels of the day are cast in his absence. As Michael sung, ‘…there’s someone I forgot to be… I just hope you understand, sometimes the clothes do not make the man…’ Wai Kin’s message is chanted by their characters in a single voice, ‘I see myselves in you reflected back at me…’ alluding to the many facets that make up an individual since, as complex beings, we nomadically roam the different spaces within ourselves.

Wai Kin’s practice speaks to individuals for whom established societal structures of the binary offer no alternative nor anything in between. The choice of visual language resonates with contemporary popular culture and perhaps allows their work to be more accessible to a breadth of audience, not so versed in contemporary art, whilst engaging with personal themes that many identify with. It’s Always You is presented on two large flatscreens alongside marketing posters, wigs and life-size cut-outs.

In the same room, one of their boyband characters, The Storyteller, makes a guest appearance in Today’s Top Stories, endlessly repeating in a visual loop but with a different tale each time. There are two further rooms of Wai Kin’s artwork to pass through on the Turner Prize trail, the final space representing the moment of return from Wai Kin universe to home or perhaps the self deep within. Here the ghosts of Wai Kin’s characters are retained by the make-up they wore being transferred, through pressing, onto facial wipes.

On entering Ingrid Pollard’s exhibition, I begin to realise the extent of overlapping themes in all four artists’ exhibitions and their longer-term practices. Pollard describes herself as an artist and photographer, who began taking photographs from a young age. This has refined her eye to read and make photography with investigative perception. ‘I’m always the subject of my own work’ she explains. ‘It’s me expressing something about a landscape, a person or an issue so I’m always in it.’ While Sin Wai Kin puts themself in the frame, Pollard’s absence remains a subtle manifestation of herself.

These artists, three generations of makers in different media who engage with visual culture so keenly that they have mastered their crafts, recall centuries of human and natural history whose outcomes of migration or displacement are articulated in their artwork. These artists represent peoples from four or five different continents. Their identities are not rigid, rather their fluidity being inherent from the different factors that have contributed to the passages that led to where they are now, informed by their own direct experiences and that of their ancestors. In their quests, these artists are seeking out who they are and their place, not only here in Britain, in the 21st century, but in the wider world and also the one that is engineered by the conventions and constructs of society and mass media.  

So, what of this ‘prize’ that I became aware of in the early 90s as an art student? The very first Turner Prize award ceremony was brought to TV audiences as part of BBC’s Omnibus arts documentary programme almost 40 years ago. Established in 1984, the prize reached the height of notoriety a decade after its inauguration when Rachel Whiteread, the first female winner in 1993, was offered twice the prize money in a gesture against the arts establishment. In this era of acid house anthems, K Foundation’s Anti-Turner prize proclaimed Whiteread the ‘worst’ artist in England. Extracting the exhibitions representing the nominated artists from the context – the theatre of The Turner Prize that rewards ‘a winner,’ often amongst controversy – can be a challenge.

In the 1980s, art house cinema, supported by Film 4, was accessible to the masses and, similarly, the Tate Gallery’s media deal with Channel 4 resulted in contemporary art reaching a broader, possibly younger, audience than it had achieved on the BBC. This contributed to the making of a widely recognisable brand, Tate, at the turn of the twentieth century when Tate Modern opened to draw audiences from afar. The Turner Prize was set up by Tate Gallery Director, Sir Alan Bowness, to promote new developments in contemporary British art. Even the very first award ceremony, aired to almost two million British citizens, stirred scorn from the press. There were valid questions of the winner’s relevance to British Art, as Malcolm Morley had spent the preceding 25 years living in New York.

In his 1986 Guardian article following the award presentation to Gilbert and George, Waldemar Januszczak questioned and eloquently answered why it is that ‘Not everyone does like the Turner Prize’, an admission Bowness acceded. The finger points to Lord Gowrie, a writer, poet and former lecturer in English and American literature who trained as an art dealer on Bond Street. In 1983 Gowrie was appointed Minister for the Arts following Thatcher’s landslide election. He was instrumental in establishing the Turner Prize, stating the first Turner Prize ceremony was to be a ‘razzamatazz, show business knees-up’ to transform the Tate Gallery. An apparent act of direct ministerial intervention intended to influence and dispel, in his own words, the perception that an ‘old maiden aunt’ occupied the site of a former prison at Millbank.

Gowrie, in the business of glamourising art, has benefited the few whose work fits that niche. The counterbalance now being all of us dedicated to promoting the work of many more artists while making a case for its relevance in the 21st century and its support by tax-payers money. Subsidy for the arts in the UK is a relative drop in the ocean. There are, of course, government departments spending billions more, prompting a demand for answers to bigger questions, such as why so little of the public purse supports British engineered measures against the climate crisis. Diplomatic deals that profit foreign businesses over home grown innovation astound many.

Madonna, in her 2001 speech before announcing Martin Creed as winner, stated there is ‘no such thing as the best... personally I think award ceremonies are silly … do awards make the world a better place? Not really…’ The eternal opportunist also plugged her newest album of greatest hits, the designer of her outfit and, in an apparent defiant act against the programme’s producers, who asked to review the content of her speech prior to broadcast, stated ‘I would also like to say – right on m*****f******! – everyone is a winner.’ In short, she achieved yet another media distraction from the main event of the prize-giving.

The Turner Prize 2022 brings together the best of British art in four artists representing all creative practitioners today, in the UK and internationally, working across the artforms, engaging with pressing and personal issues of our day. These are challenges that affect us all but are perhaps embraced whole-heartedly by younger generations with genuine appetite and intention for change. One can only conclude that this reinforces Madonna’s battle-cry against a tide of glitzy art awards - that everyone is, indeed, a winner.

At the exhibition exit visitors have an opportunity to vote for the best. I refrain from forcing a decision, feeling it would be unfair. Visitors judge the exhibitions they have seen. This differs from the judging panel of decision makers’ selection of finalists and winner, based on recent exhibitions and their broader practice. Contemporary commentator Laura Cumming questioned the process of selection and judging in her Guardian review, concluding that ‘the system always goes awry, one way or another. The Turner Prize never makes any sense.’ While Ben Luke of Art Newspaper reflects on the point of art prizes, proposing that ‘Perhaps it is time to knock art prizes on the head’.