LIVERPOOL, UK.-The Turner Prize 2007 exhibition is on view at Tate Liverpool. It features work by the four shortlisted artists, Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger. The winner of the prize will be announced during a live broadcast of the award ceremony on Channel 4 on the evening of Monday 3 December. The Turner Prize 2007 is supported by Arts Council England, Liverpool Culture Company, Northwest Regional Development Agency, Milligan and Tate Members. With the support of the sponsors, this year’s prize fund is £40,000 with £25,000 going to the winner and £5,000 each for the other shortlisted artists.
The winner will be decided by a jury whose members are: Michael Bracewell, writer and critic; Fiona Bradley, Director, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Thelma Golden, Director & Chief Curator, StudioMuseum, Harlem; Miranda Sawyer, freelance broadcaster and writer and Christoph Grunenberg, Director of Tate Liverpool and Chairman of the Jury.
The shortlisted artists for the Turner Prize 2007 are:
Zarina Bhimjiwho presents a new series of photographs and a new film, Waiting 2007, made following her recent travels in India, Zanzibar and East Africa. The works emerge from a lengthy period of research into the countries’ discrete yet intersecting histories. However facts and figures ultimately give way in her images to instinct and intuition, as her rigorous attention to composition, light, form and texture convey qualities of universal human emotion and existence.
Nathan Coley who presents a carefully orchestrated installation that brings together works in various media. Rooted in urban and social practice, and underpinned by detailed research, Coley’s art explores the ways in which systems of social and political value can be inferred through the built environment. Meaning and intent is revealed through our physical engagement with the work to open up a range of possible readings; religious, political, as well as purely aesthetic. In addition to THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE 2006, Coley will be showing new works made especially for the exhibition.
Mike Nelson who presents a new, immersive Amnesiac Shrine. After a hiatus of nearly a decade the Amnesiacs, a mythical gang of bikers invented by the artist in the mid-1990s, have made a recent comeback. Here Nelson turns to them once again for their help in buildingAMNESIAC SHRINE or The misplacement (a futurological fable): mirrored cubes - inverted - with the reflection of an inner psyche as represented by a metaphorical landscape 2007. The materials and references used to construct it, provided by ‘flashbacks’ from the Amnesiacs, are elevated by their devotional context yet remain largely indefinable.
Mark Wallinger who presentsSleeper2004/5. The work records a live performance in which the artist, dressed in a bear suit, occupied the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The bear, symbol of the city of Berlin, was alone in the museum for ten consecutive nights. In this meditative yet disquieting work, notions of national memory and allegory converge to continue Wallinger’s examination of the themes of identity and representation.
