arts and design

Turner prize 2019 review – all aboard Margate’s seaside special

[ad_1]

It’s not usually difficult to nab a seat on the high-speed train from London to Margate. This week, though, you might have had to shove aside the stream of art critics piling into Kent for the Turner prize exhibition. To add to the congestion, shortlisted artist Oscar Murillo decided to populate his portion of the gallery with a crowd of 20 lifesize papier-mache effigies. They travelled in on the commuter train on Tuesday, each one cheerfully escorted by a volunteer.

If you happened to have witnessed the scene at the station – the bedraggled puppets variously lugged and wheeled along a drizzly seafront – you’d be forgiven for mistaking the whole thing for a soggy carnival. Murillo draws from traditional Colombian festivities, where effigies are set alight to mark the new year. But here at Turner Contemporary they make for a more complicated viewing experience.

Now arranged in the gallery, the scruffy figures sit slumped in church pews, dolefully facing a shrouded window from which a sliver of the North Sea can be glimpsed. They are a secular congregation. Lumpy rather than lovely, battered rather than beautiful. There’s a pathos to their inert forms that is representative, Murillo suggests, of capitalist labour and the exhausted bodies of alienated workers.

True to form, all of the four shortlisted works this year are infused with some kind of political thinking. More unusually, every piece feels sophisticated in its configuration of that politics.

Helen Cammock’s The Long Note at Turner Contemporary.



Helen Cammock’s The Long Note at Turner Contemporary. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Helen Cammock’s film The Long Note derives from her solo exhibition at Void in Derry, last year. It joins archive footage with newly recorded interviews in an attempt to acknowledge the efforts of the women involved in the Northern Irish civil rights movement of 1968. Her images are patiently pieced together: dilapidated houses crumbling from bomb damage, street murals brightly emblazoned with the faces of female activists, closeups of rusted bridges, an array of giant inflatables disconsolately drifting across drab waters, a cluster of satellite dishes.

The film moves slowly, cutting across time and reinserting the voices that have fallen out of the historical narrative. Women’s names and stories are woven throughout – Mary Ann McCracken, Betsy Gray, Bernadette Devlin – but Cammock is there too. She is the blurry, anoraked figure who steps in to wipe a rain-smeared lens. It’s her thin, brown hand that slips into shot, sorting through images. Occasionally you’ll catch her voice drifting in from off-camera. Her presence, bearing witness, reminds us of the deep solidarity between different freedom movements. Intersectionality sometimes has the ring of thorny jargon, but Cammock lives it in this project, pressing us to see the continuity between feminism, the troubles in Northern Ireland and the African American civil rights struggle.

Tai Shani’s installation: ‘so wildly idiosyncratic it’s hard to know where to begin’.



Tai Shani’s installation: ‘so wildly idiosyncratic it’s hard to know where to begin’. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Outside the screening room, a study space provides tracts by Angela Davis and screen prints of activist slogans declaring “Evocation is a mutual emotion”. It’s a gesture that could have felt didactic, but Cammock’s presence in the work is so unobtrusive that it has the effect of softening the edges of any polemic.

Tai Shani’s installation is not quite as subtle. Rather, it’s a generous wallop of shape and colour. She has a large room and even larger ideas. The project is so wildly idiosyncratic that’s its hard to know quite where to begin. Amorphous, red velvety shapes dangle from the sky, wriggle through hoops and lie strewn on the floor. Is this an enormous penis with a comic extrusion of glass bubbles at one end? And what’s happened to that arm, grotesquely disfigured and topped with a giant green hand?

Who knows what’s going on? Shani, you suspect. She refers us to the French medieval moralist Christine de Pizan, esoteric mythologies and feminist theory. But perhaps imagining an alternative reality for women is only really a radical act when it refuses to be so easily understood. It’s all so bracingly bonkers, that after a while you start to wonder when you landed on this strange planet and how Shani came to be its benevolent ruler.

Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan



Lawrence Abu Hamdan with his work, ‘investigations into the acoustics of incarceration’. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is trying to understand something in his project, too. Of all the work shortlisted this year, it’s his that feels most coherent, skilled and sensitive. It’s impossible to leave unchanged by it. He offers two short films and a lightbox for this exhibition. Together they present his investigations into the acoustics of incarceration. Hamdan has assembled his own personal sound-effects library in an effort to replicate the aural memories of former prisoners. They include inmates of Saydnaya prison in Syria, widely acknowledged as a site for torture and executions.

Hamdan is the dispassionate sound engineer, trying out objects that are endlessly flicked, flailed, brushed and struck into microphones. But the human brutality is never really at bay. The films are compulsively interesting, tracking both his technical experimentations and the graver realisations he comes to over the course of the project. The sound of a person being hit resembles the demolition of a wall. You’ll walk away and it won’t be just your footsteps ringing in your ears.

[ad_2]

READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.  Learn more