“I’ve been here five minutes and already I’m shopping,” despaired one of the first visitors to the 2015 Turner prize show as she rushed off to one of the artworks, a showroom selling everything from doorknobs to coffee tables to mantelpieces.
Elsewhere visitors will wander around chairs with fur coats, listen to singers telling surreal and sad stories and hear accusations that Sky TV is run by a cabal of mysterious grey aliens.
The Turner prize is in Scotland for the first time, with this year’s exhibition opening to the public on Thursday at Tramway in Glasgow. Now in its 31st year, the annual prize rewards the best contemporary artwork by British artists under 50 and always arouses debate and surprise and very often indignation. This year is no different.
The sales showroom is the work of Assemble, a collective of 18 young people working across architecture, design and art who were nominated for a community housing project in Liverpool. “It was a real shock when we were nominated,” admitted Fran Edgerley. “We had no idea we were even being considered.”
They all sat down and agreed to accept, and then came the “challenging” process of deciding what to do for the exhibition. Lewis Jones said: “We were keen to make sure it was something that had real meaning and benefit to people, that it was not just a way of reflecting work we had already done.”
The result is a social enterprise, setting up a new company called Granby Workshop, which makes handmade products for homes – the sorts of things that were stripped out of the Liverpool houses they are involved with.
People can browse the showroom, pick up a catalogue and then visit the website, and perhaps be tempted by a tile for £8, a cupboard doorknob for £15 or, for the really flush, a Granby rock mantelpiece for £1,500. All the profits will go back into the regeneration of the area.
It is a social enterprise, but is it art? “Yes,” said Edgerley. “Why can’t it be both?”
Jones added: “It is also an opportunity for people to support the rebuilding of the area [Granby Four Streets] and in doing so get something for their own home.”
In another part of the gallery is a study room called The Military Industrial Complex, created by Bonnie Camplin. Visitors will be able to put on headphones and watch TV interviews with people who have what might charitably be described as unusual convictions. They include the belief that the SS still exists and that Sky TV is run by a species of grey aliens.
One woman explains how she and her family get taken to different universes by aliens. “My father had access to time travel technology when he was in the shadow government in the 1940s,” she elaborates.
All around the room are textbooks – on hypnosis, aliens, fairies and so on – which people can leaf through, and visitors’ conclusion may well be: what if they’re right?
Janice Kerbel’s work is the only one nominated which will not be there all of the time, in that it is a performance of nine songs by six classical singers. Sometimes the full 24-minute cycle of songs will be performed; other times the performance might last four minutes or just 20 seconds.
Kerbel spent nearly three years teaching herself musical notation to make the piece called DOUG. “Look up to hear the weight of lead/Crack tortoise on my head,” a countertenor sings beautifully to a rapt gallery audience.
The fourth artist is Nicole Wermers, who, like Camplin and Kerbel, is exhibiting in more or less the same form a version of the work she was nominated for. In Wermers’ case it is Infrastruktur, an installation of 10 versions of Marcel Breuer’s Cesca chairs with fur coats from eBay sewn on to them.
Tate, which organises the Turner prize, is committed to showing it outside London every two years. Sarah Munro, director of Tramway, said it was a big deal for the venue and for the city.
“The prize allows us to share what we are passionate about with the wider public. It highlights Glasgow as a contemporary art city, which of course we know, you can’t walk down the street without bumping into an artist, but this helps us raise the visibility. It is about welcoming a whole new audience.
The doors open to the public on Thursday and if the experience of Derry in 2013 and Gateshead in 2011 is anything to go by, Tramway can expect healthy visitor numbers.
When it was at the Baltic in Gateshead in 2011 there were long queues to get in and around 145,000 visitors over the course of the show – more than when it is held in London.
“What’s exciting about the four artists here is that they are all really engaging in different ways with ideas about the world and where it is now,” said Munro.
The £25,000 winner of the prize, won previously by artists including Anish Kapoor, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller and Gillian Wearing, will be announced on 7 December.
• Turner Prize 2015 is at Tramway 1 October to 17 January.
