Turner Prize 2015 shortlist announced

Tate Britain today announced the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2015. This year the exhibition will be held at Tramway, Glasgow and it is the first time the Turner Prize has been held in Scotland. The artists are (in alphabetical order): Assemble, Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers.

For projects including the ongoing collaboration with local residents and others in the Granby Four Streets, Liverpool. Assemble are a London-based collective who work across the fields of art, design and architecture to create projects in tandem with the communities who use and inhabit them. Their architectural spaces and environments promote direct action and embrace a DIY sensibility.

ForThe Military Industrial Complex, South London Gallery. Bonnie Camplin’s practice, which she broadly describes as ‘the Invented Life,’ is characterised by the critique of existing power-structures, and spans the disciplines of drawing, film, performance, music and writing. The Military Industrial Complex took the form of a study room exploring what ‘consensus reality’ is and how it is formed, drawing from physics to philosophy, psychology, witchcraft, quantum theory and warfare.

For her operatic work DOUG, commissioned by The Common Guild at Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Kerbel borrows from conventional modes of narrative in order to create elaborate imagined forms. Her precisely crafted works often take the form of audio recordings, performance and printed matter. DOUG is a performative work which takes the form of nine songs for six voices.

For her exhibition Infrastruckur, Herald Street, London. Nicole Wermers creates sculptures, collages and installations which explore the appropriation of art and design within consumer culture. Her installation Infrastruktur adopted the glossy aesthetics and materials of modernist design and high fashion, alluding to themes of lifestyle, class, consumption and control.  

The Turner Prize award is £40,000 with £25,000 going to the winner and £5,000 each for the other shortlisted artists. The prize, established in 1984, is awarded to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of work in the twelve months preceding 17 April 2015. It is intended to promote public discussion of new developments in contemporary British art and is widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe. Every other year, the prize leaves Tate Britain and is presented at a venue outside the capital.

An exhibition of work by the four shortlisted artists will be free and will run from 1 October 2015 until 17 January 2016 at Tramway, Glasgow. The winner will be announced at an award ceremony on Monday 7 December 2015.

The members of the Turner Prize 2015 jury are Alistair Hudson, Director, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Kyla McDonald, Artistic Director, Glasgow Sculpture Studios; Joanna Mytkowska, Director, Museum Sztuki Nowoczesnej; and Jan Verwoert, critic and curator. The jury is chaired by Penelope Curtis, Director, Tate Britain.