Turner Prize 2015 exhibition
The Turner Prize, organised by Tate, is awarded to a British artist under the age of 50 for an outstanding exhibition in the preceding year. In 2015 it came to Tramway, and Scotland, for the first time ever.
The shortlisted artists were Assemble, Bonnie Camplin, Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers.
The prize was awarded to Assemble, who work in tandem with communities to realise a ground up approach to regeneration, city planning and development in opposition to corporate gentrification.
They draw on long traditions of artistic and collective initiatives that experiment in art, design and architecture. In doing so they offer alternative models to how societies can work. The long term collaboration between Granby Four Streets and Assemble shows the importance of artistic practice being able to drive and shape urgent issues in the post-industrial era.
Announced at Tramway, in partnership with Tate, the £25,000 prize was presented by artist, musician and songwriter, Kim Gordon during a live broadcast on Channel 4.
The jury applauded the strength of all the nominated artists' work.
About the other nominated artists
Bonnie Camplin
Bonnie Camplin gathers her expanded practice under a single idea: the 'Invented Life’. Central to this idea is what Camplin describes as a "myth-science of energy and consciousness research" in which subjective experience is taken as the primary datum of evidence. Her work spans the disciplines of drawing, film, performance, music and writing as well as immaterial and situational research.
The Military Industrial Complex, South London Gallery, took the form of a study room exploring what ‘consensus reality’ is and how it is formed, drawing from physics to philosophy, psychology, witchcraft, quantum theory and warfare.
The Military Industrial Complex was commissioned by South London Gallery and Anxiety Arts Festival London 2014.
Janice Kerbel
Janice Kerbel works with a wide range of media including audio, print, radio plays and performance. Employing recognisable conventions from a variety of disciplines – from theatre to sport to music – Kerbel’s work inhabits existing structures while freeing them from their traditional use. In her work, events normally considered impossible to depict are given form that is both unexpected and strangely familiar.
Kerbel was nominated for her most recent work, DOUG, a musical composition in the form of nine songs for six voices. DOUG, the protagonist, moves through a choreographed history of imagined disaster, translating ‘accident’ into musical form. Voice, rhythmic verse and the structures inherent in music are used to give shape to the events that befall him.
DOUG was commissioned by the Common Guild, Glasgow in 2014 and first staged at the Mitchell Library in May 2014.
Nicole Wermers
Nicole Wermers creates sculptures, collages and installations which explore the modernist constructions underpinning consumer culture and our urban environment. Employing the glossy, reflective materials associated with high modernism, her quasi-functional sculptures resemble the banal design features associated with transient public spaces.
Wermers has been nominated for her exhibition Infrastruktur (‘Infrastructure’) at Herald Street Gallery, London 2014 which adopted the surface aesthetics and materials of luxury goods and designer furniture, alluding to themes of lifestyle, class, consumption and control.
Header image: Assemble's Turner Prize Installation, Tramway, 2015
Other installation images
Top: Bonnie Camplin
Bottom left: Janice Kerbel
Bottom right: Nicole Wermers
All photos taken at Tramway, 2015, by Keith Hunter