Towner Eastbourne today unveils an exhibition of work by the four artists nominated for the Turner Prize 2023: Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker.
One of the world’s best-known prizes for the visual arts, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary art. The winner will be announced on 5 December 2023 at an award ceremony in Eastbourne’s Winter Garden.
Jesse Darling works in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, sound, text and performance, using a ‘materialist poetics’ to explore and reimagine the everyday technologies that represent how we live. Darling has often combined industrial materials such as sheet metal and welded steel with everyday objects to explore ideas of the domestic and the institutional, home and state, stability and instability, function and dysfunction, growth and collapse.
Darling was nominated for his solo exhibitions No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at Camden Art Centre. Taking cues from Towner’s coastal location, Dar- ling brings together new and recent works in an installation that explores borders, bodies, nationhood and exclusion. The sculptural works Corpus (Half-staff) and Inter Alia I (both 2022) form a fragmented colonnade in the gallery. Here, concrete and polystyrene pillars are topped with barbed wire, venetian blinds and net curtains. Pedestrian barriers and prickly anti-bird spikes also echo a hostile and controlling element of the built environment, with a jarring proximity to our domestic everyday.
Ghislaine Leung’s practice takes a critical look at the conditions of art production, its presentation and circulation. Leung has developed a process of art making that results in ‘score-based artworks’. The ‘scores’ are text-based instructions or descriptions that are realised by the gallery team in close conversation with the artist.
Leung was nominated for her solo exhibition Fountains at Simian, Copenhagen which consisted of five score-based works including Fountains (2022), an artwork created from a score that simply states ‘a fountain installed in the exhibition space to cancel sound’. At Towner, the exhibition also features a baby monitor installed in the art store, broadcasting live to the exhibition space, and a wall drawing representing the hours that Leung can dedicate to working in her studio. These examples speak to the realities of working in multiple roles as an artist and mother, and highlight Leung’s interest in the time, labour and sup- port structures required to make and maintain artworks.
Rory Pilgrim is a multidisciplinary artist working across song writing, composition, films, texts, drawings, paintings and live performances. Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience.
Pilgrim was nominated for the commission RAFTS at Serpentine and Barking Town Hall, and a live performance of the work at Cadogan Hall, London. The RAFTS (2022) film presented at Towner is a seven-song oratorio narrated by eight residents of Barking and Dagenham from Green Shoes Arts, reflecting on what the symbol of a raft means to them through song, music and poetry. They are joined by singers Declan Rowe John, Robyn Haddon, Kayden Fearon and members of Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance. RAFTS was made during the Covid-19 pandemic and in this work Pilgrim positions the raft as a symbol of support keeping us afloat in challenging and precarious circumstances. Timed screenings of RAFTS and RAFTS: Live are presented alongside paintings, drawings and sculptures that expand this theme.
Barbara Walker works in a range of media and formats, from embossed works on paper to paintings on canvas and large-scale charcoal wall drawings. Growing up in Birmingham, Walker’s experiences have shaped a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gen- der, race, representation and belonging.
Walker was nominated for her presentation entitled Burden of Proof at Sharjah Biennial 15. In this body of work, Walker brings careful attention and visibility to individuals and families affected by the Windrush scandal. The exhibition at Towner features large scale charcoal figures drawn directly onto the gallery wall and a series of works on paper. Monochromatic portraits of people impacted by the scandal are layered over hand-drawn re- productions of documents that evidence their right to remain in the UK. Walker invites the viewer to consider the true consequences of political decision-making, the complexities of diasporic identity and the struggle for legitimacy.
Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain and Chair of the Turner Prize 2023 jury, said: “I would like to warmly congratulate each of the four shortlisted artists on their outstand- ing presentations as part of the Turner Prize 2023 exhibition at Towner this year. Jesse Dar- ling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker have remarkably varied approaches to creating art that actively responds to and reflects the world around us – engaging with the social, economic, cultural and political issues of our time. The Turner Prize offers a fascinating snapshot of contemporary British art now, and a key part of its popularity is its ability to spot- light the rich cultural offerings of our towns and cities on its travels to a new host venue every other year. Towner’s dynamic centenary programme makes this a truly unmissable moment in Turner Prize history, and I look forward to this year’s exhibition being enjoyed by East Sussex’s residents and visitors alike.”
The Turner Prize was established in 1984 and is awarded each year to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work. The Turner Prize award is £55,000 with £25,000 going to the winner and £10,000 each for the other shortlisted artists.
The members of the Turner Prize 2023 jury are Martin Clark, Director, Camden Art Centre; Ceìdric Fauq, Chief Curator, Capc museìe d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Melanie Keen, Director of Wellcome Collection; and Helen Nisbet, CEO and Artistic Director, Cromwell Place, and Artistic Director, Art Night. The jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain.
Eastbourne ALIVE programme will be running throughout the Turner Prize exhibition period. To accompany the exhibition, a series of major public artworks and interventions will be installed across Eastbourne by artists: Nadina Ali, Flo Brooks, Helen Cammock, Na- than Coley, Martyn Cross, Eve De Haan, Tarek Lakhrissi, Adam Moore, Madeleine Pledge, Michael Rakowitz, Rottingdean Bazaar and Liz Wilson as well as projects for young people. https://eastbournealive.co.uk