Turner Prize 2022 at Tate Liverpool

This year, Tate Liverpool has the honour and pleasure of hosting what is perhaps the most important event in contemporary art in the UK – the Turner Prize. The prize is awarded to a British artist for outstanding work in an exhibition in the preceding year and this year’s selection does not disappoint. 

The 2022 shortlist includes Sin Wai Kin, Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard and Veronica Ryan. The artists are seemingly very different in their approach to art-making but they are joined by their desire to push boundaries and challenge our perceptions of the world, whether it’s about gender, ecology or the absurd. Let’s take a quick look at the nominated four.

Heather Phillipson is an artist who encourages curiosity and cultivates strangeness – her multimedia work is constantly shifting in form and focus, with elusive subject matter that sometimes materialises in the form of bold, public-space sculpture. You may have seen what is perhaps her most famous work: THE END – a giant sculpture of whipped cream with a cherry and a drone sitting on top, shown in Trafalgar Square. Phillipson is nominated for her solo exhibition RUPTURE NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach – a large, colourful, audio-visual immersive space that the artist describes as “happening in a parallel time-zone.”

Ingrid Pollard is predominantly a photographer but also works with sculpture, sound and movement. She explores themes of Britishness, race, landscape, sexuality, history and deep time and challenges assumptions about the experience of alienation, as illustrated by her well-known work Pastoral Interlude from 1987. Pollard is nominated for her solo exhibition Carbon Slowly Turning at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. For the show, she presents Seventeen of Sixty Eight (2018), a display based on her extensive research into racist depictions of ‘the African’ in our surroundings, from pub signs and objects, to literature and the larger landscape. As well as other photo series, Pollard also presents Bow Down and Very Low – 123 (2021), a set of kinetic sculptures.

Traces and memory are the key themes of Veronica Ryan’s work. Nominated for her solo exhibition Along a Spectrum at Spike Island, Bristol and her Hackney Windrush Art Commission in London, Ryan uses motifs of fruits, vegetables and seeds, as well as containers and compartments in her sculpture and installations which range from minimalist and smaller in scale, to larger public work. In the Turner Prize show, you can see these objects created in her signature style enveloped in the warm yellow of the exhibition space.

Sin Wai Kin is a London-based, non-binary, mixed race multimedia artist who expertly leaps between categories and bends existing narratives in order to describe the experience of identification, desire and consciousness. Sin’s video works are filled with mesmerising characters whose journeys lead them to dissolving binaries. The artist was nominated for their involvement in the British Art Show 9 and their solo presentation at Blindspot Gallery. For the display at the Tate, they present three films, including It’s Always You (2021), where the artist masterfully takes on the roles of four individual members of a boyband.

Luckily for us, having the Turner Prize exhibition on our doorstep means we can easily see the show in person and perhaps even pick our favourites ahead of the winner announcement in December. So put this one in your diary – the opportunity to see it is too good to be missed.