The Turner Prize 2022

(Tate Liverpool, until 19 March 2023) 

Review by John Siddique

Heather Phillipson’s work on show at the Turner Prize 2022 exhibition renders art, and through it the gallery, as a living, breathing space. You walk into the installation – Rupture No 6: biting the blowtorched peach – through multiple screens showing close-ups of different animal eyes, while multi-channel speakers play the animal sounds up close. In the main room, you encounter a tin shed with clanging gas canisters suspended above and blown by fans, so they bang off each other rhythmically. High-blown wind sounds in the space around the shed amplify implied feeling of the projections of sky, clouds, and nature which scud the surrounding walls. On suspended headphones, you can listen to snippets of text and poetry, cut, pasted, and blended in a Burial-style remix. The effect of Phillipson’s work is beautifully visceral – you suddenly feel alive. As I write this, a small child is careering around the gallery, yawping his lungs out. This art affects you directly. Here we are in space, in nature, where life is, whether we take part in it or not. It’s been a long time since I was excited by new art. We seem to have left the conceptual era of art to emerge at last in direct experience.

Philipson is one of four artists shortlisted for the 2022 prize. The works of the winner, Veronica Ryan, in contrast, sit in great stillness in a large yellow room occupied by plinths. Crocheted string bags hanging down, medical pillows piled around, collected objects such as shells, takeaway containers, things both familiar and unfamiliar, imply a glacial undercurrent of feeling – fragmentary memories and mute commentaries, like the pieces of a broken mirror reflecting a series of internalised images. The spaces between things, the angles, and the reflections, add up to a greater whole. Something is being whispered here: memories of the maternal, the horror of Covid and the lockdown years. A yellow room of high psychological resonance. It is a questioning space. A feeling of felt, sensed space, an uncomfortable space. Each person I observe moves through the gallery quickly. It is a strong choice, it seems, to meet the challenge to stay, to look closely, to see the whole in the disparate. 

Sin Wai Kin’s installation, It’s Always You, opens the viewer to new constellations of self, beyond the binaries of social categories. It uses multiple and diverse characters as storytellers who communicate through the mediums of film and video, stills, and life-size model cut-outs. By leaning into the Taoist-based writings on nature of Chang Tzu (4th century BCE), identity as a limited self is challenged by something greater which might be expressed beautifully and playfully if we would only allow ourselves. Sin Wai Kin’s creations show us the universe looking out through our eyes, living through our bodies. It asks us to be the body and the universal in life simultaneously. Their work is stylised and yet deeply human and moving. Masculine and feminine are given up in their piece ‘The Wholeness of Things’ – a film-based work in which Sin’s hybrid personas play out a vivid dream. We go beyond the limiting dualisms we have lived with for so many millennia, something which is experienced more as a revelation of what is than the adoption of an idea. As with Phillipson’s work, we are in an experience of directness and presence. And, as with each exhibit, your reviewer takes time to observe the reactions of the people in the gallery. Some uncomfortably talk and look at their phones, perhaps to disallow seeing and feeling, while others are deeply absorbed. 

Ingrid Pollard’s installation, Seventeen of Sixty Eight, reaches back through decades of her research into depictions of ‘The African’ in British history, through architecture, landscapes, and the ephemera of the good old English pub. A history and structural wound hidden in plain sight, and still defended blindly as ever. If open to the echoes of what is presented here, the viewer feels the language of unacknowledged power and of colonialism, emotionally and physically. Animated sculptural pieces conjure the foundations of the industrial revolution, financed by slavery and inflicted on the poor, which are this country’s still bleeding, unhealed underpinnings. This work speaks to power relationships, racism, homophobia, and ongoing intractability – the deep hurt that holds this county back so deeply through denial and othering. Pollard’s work uses perhaps the most traditional art techniques in the exhibition – photography, kinetic objects and canvas, yet the whole is remarkably unsettling. Each observer in the gallery seemed to take a lot of time here. You could see the penny dropping for many. Still, you could see in some the clouding of eyes, and the closing of heart that grasps to dangerously insubstantial surfaces.

Overall, the Turner Prize 2022 exhibition offers viewers a thought-provoking and moving experience. Each artist challenges the viewer to consider the world in new and more profound ways, inviting them to experience the art directly, while being present in the moment. Such a stunning display of contemporary art should not be missed. It is the most reflective exhibition yet of the Global Majority presence in the ‘British’ art-world. That it is in a ‘Tate’ gallery, named for a post-slavery British sugar conglomerate which traded from estates established under slavery, and in the port of Liverpool with all that has been lived through here, is fitting. There is a profound recognition of us, our history, and our world in this exhibition filled with honesty and hope.

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/turner-prize-2022

John Siddique

John Siddique is a sacred teacher and writer.