Turner Prize 2019 Shortlist Released
By Xuan Wei Yap
The shortlisted artists for the 2019 Turner Prize are (left to right) TAI SHANI, HELEN CAMMOCK (copyright Magda Stawarska-Beavan), LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN (courtesy Miro Kuzmanovic), and OSCAR MURILLO (courtesy Jungwon Kim).
On May 1, London’s Tate Britain named Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani as the four shortlisted artists for the 2019 Turner Prize. The winner of the GBP 25,000 award will be announced at a ceremony on December 3, 2019. The three other finalists will each receive GBP 5,000.
The 2019 Turner Prize jury is chaired by Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, and composed of London-based gallery directors Alessio Antoniolli, of Gasworks, and The Showroom’s Elvira Dyangani Ose; Victoria Pomery, director of Turner Contemporary in Margate; and fashion and arts journalist Charlie Porter.
Beirut-based artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan was selected for his innovative use of sound in his traveling solo exhibition “Earwitness Theatre” (2018–19), which debuted at London’s Chisenhale Gallery last September and attempts to recreate the sonic experiences of Syria’s Saydnaya prison through the “earwitness testimony” of ex-prisoners, as well as his film installation Walled Unwalled and performance After Sfx (both 2018), presented at the Tate Modern. Multimedia artist Helen Cammock was praised for her “timely and urgent” film The Long Note (2018), which uncovers the role of women in the 1968 civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, and was recently exhibited at Derry’s Void Gallery and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo was nominated for his inventive incorporation of a variety of materials and techniques in his mixed-media paintings probing experiences of displacement and the effects of globalization, as shown in his participation at the 10th Berlin Biennale and his solo exhibition “Violent Amnesia” (2019) at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. The jury recognized self-taught multidisciplinary artist Tai Shani’s ongoing project Dark Continent (2018– )—shown at Glasgow International 2018 and at the Tetley, Leeds—exploring “feminine subjectivity and experience through a gothic/sci-fi lens.”
For the first time in its 15-year history, the Turner Prize finalists’ exhibition will be staged outside of London, at the Turner Contemporary. It will run from September 28 to January 12, 2020.
Xuan Wei Yap is an editorial intern of ArtAsiaPacific.
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