Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool showcases work of 2022 nominees

Work by the four artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize goes on show at Tate Liverpool this week – 15 years after the gallery last staged the prestigious art event.

Liverpool was the first location outside London to host the Turner Prize when it took place at the Royal Albert Dock venue in November 2007.

This year’s award is being contested by Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Sin Wai Kin who are all showing new or existing work across the fourth-floor galleries.

Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain and Co-chair of the Turner Prize 2022 jury, said: “Fifteen 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.”

And Helen Legg, Director of Tate Liverpool and Co-chair of the Turner Prize 2022 jury, added: “I’m excited to be unveiling work by these four outstanding artists at Tate Liverpool for this year’s Turner Prize.

“This is a diverse group of artists, each with a singular vision, who are all dealing with important issues facing our society today and together their work combines to create a fascinating and vibrant exhibition.”

The Turner Prize was first held in 1984. In the last 38 years it has been won by two artists from Merseyside – Liverpool’s Tony Cragg in 1988 and Birkenhead-born Mark Leckey in 2008, and in 2015 architecture collective Assembly won for its collaboration with the Granby Four Streets community association in Toxteth.

The winner of the 2022 prize will be announced at a ceremony at St George’s Hall on December 7.

Heather Phillipson

Heather Phillipson presents RUPTURE NO 6: biting the blowtorched peach, 2022.

Reimagining her 2020 Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries commission, the London-born, Wales-raised artist, who studied at the University of Wales and Central St Martins, conjures what she calls ‘a maladapted ecosystem, an insistent atmosphere’ using colour, video, kinetic sculpture and a new audio composition.

Phillipson, whose work often involves collisions of wildly different imagery, materials and media, proposes her space at Tate Liverpool as alive and happening in a parallel time-zone.

Ingrid Pollard

Pollard, who was born in Guyana and studied at the London College of Printing, works primarily in photography, but also sculpture, film and sound to question our relationship with the natural world and interrogate ideas such as 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, ephemeral objects, within literature and in surrounding landscapes, Bow Down and Very Low – 123, 2021, which includes a trio of kinetic sculptures using everyday objects to reference power dynamics though their gestures, and the photo series DENY: IMAGINE: ATTACK, 1991, and SILENCE, 2019, which looks at the language of power, both emotional and physical.

Veronica Ryan

Veronica Ryan, who was born in Montserrat and studied at SOAS and The Slade, presents 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.

Rather than having fixed meanings, Ryan’s work is typically open to a wide variety of readings, as implied by titles such as Multiple Conversations, 2019–21 or Along a Spectrum, 2021.

Made during a residency at Spike Island, the forms she creates take recognisable elements and materials – such as fruit, takeaway food containers, feathers, or paper – and reconfigure them, exploring ecology, history and dislocation, as well as the psychological impact of the pandemic.

Sin Wai Kin

Toronto-born Sin Wai Kin, who studied at Camberwell Art College and the Royal College of Art, brings fantasy to life through storytelling in performance, moving image, and ephemera.

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, It’s Always You, 2021, in which the artist adopts the roles of four boyband members, striving to take on the multiplicity of identities that transcend constructed binaries, and Today’s Top Stories, which sees Sin playing the character of The Storyteller, posing as a news anchor who recites philosophical propositions on existence, consciousness, naming and identity.

The Turner Prize 2022 is at Tate Liverpool from October 20 to March 19.

Top: RUPTURE NO 6: biting the blowtorched peach, 2022 by Heather Phillipson