Dublin-born artist Duncan Campbell is the favourite to win the 30th Turner prize, which is announced tonight.
Campbell’s work includes a 54-minute film featuring segments of a 1953 French film essay by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais on colonialism and African art, plus a dance routine choreographed by Michael Clark that interprets economic equations from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
Four artists – Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards and Tris Vonna-Michell have been nominated for the prize, which is one of the most prestigious and controversial competitions in the art world. It returns to London for its 30th anniversary after last year’s excursion to Northern Ireland for Derry’s term as city of culture.
Campbell is currently favourite to win, according to the UK’s biggest bookmakers Ladbrokes and William Hill, which are both offering odds of 7/4. However, the prize is rarely bestowed upon its favourites, as seen when David Shrigley lost out to surprise winner Laure Prouvost last year.
Three of the four artists are showing film this year, which curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas says is a response to a “lack of fixed meaning” in the world around the artists and their work. The predominant use of film is a response to “how we navigate the world increasingly through images”, she said. “The internet changed the way that we interact with each other. It’s only natural that the artists respond to that.” In total, the film pieces add up to almost two hours of screen time.
Tris Vonna-Michell is this year’s bookies rank outsider. His work Finding Chopin: Dans l’Essex (2014) is inspired by a French sound poet who spent part of his life in Essex, close to where the 31-year-old artist grew up. His other work, Postscript II (Berlin) 2014, is a slide installation based on a story about the his mother’s childhood in post-war Germany.
Cardiff-born James Richards’ film Rosebud 2013 includes partially censored, erotic images from a book found in a Tokyo library, which prompted the Tate Britain gallery to warn visitors about the adult nature of the content.
Ciara Phillips is the only nominee not to use film in the exhibition. The Canadian-Irish artist is the first printer to make the shortlist. Her installation Things Shared (2014) features more than 400 individual hand-printed sheets of paper, and the giant three-dimensional letters OK.
Previous winners of the Turner prize have included Martin Creed’s installation featuring a light going on and off and Grayson Perry’s pottery tackling subjects such as death and child abuse.
