Three Female Artists and an Architecture Collective Nominated for 2015 Turner Prize
On Tuesday, Tate Modern announced the four nominees for the 2015 Turner Prize: multidisciplinary artist Bonnie Camplin, sound and performance artist Janice Kerbel, sculpture, installation, and collage artist Nicole Wermers, and the architecture collective Assemble.
On Tuesday, Tate Modern announced the four nominees for the 2015 Turner Prize: multidisciplinary artist Bonnie Camplin, sound and performance artist Janice Kerbel, sculpture, installation, and collage artist Nicole Wermers, and the architecture collective Assemble.
The winner of the prize, which is awarded every year to a British or UK-based artist under 50, will be announced on December 7 at the Tramway art center in Glasgow, which will be the first Scottish venue to host the Turner Prize exhibition. The jury for the 2015 Turner Prize consists of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art director Alistair Hudson, curator and critic Jan Verwoert, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art director Joanna Mytkowska, and the artistic director of the Glasgow Sculpture Studios Director, Kyla McDonald. The winner of last year’s Turner Prize was Glasgow-based video artist Duncan Campbell.
The greatest anomaly among this year’s nominees, by far, is the London-based architecture collective Assemble, whose works are characterized by a temporary, participatory aesthetic heavily informed by the specific demands and properties of their locations. In 2010, the group transformed a disused gas station into a pop-up movie theater dubbed The Cineroleum. In 2011, for the project Folly for a Flyover, the collective transformed a sad area under a highway overpass into a community space that attracted 40,000 over the course of its summer-long existence. Assemble has also designed a number of temporary or movable performance and exhibition spaces, as well as a number of studio and workspace complexes.
The best-known of the nominees are Nicole Wermers and Janice Kerbel, both of whom have had solo shows at Tate Britain in the last five years and neither of whom is British. Born in 1969 in Toronto, Kerbel works across a wide range of media, from light installations, music, and performance, to prints. For her solo show at the Arts Club of Chicago in 2012, she showed a series of silkscreen prints based on spotlight cues from stage performances and other prints riffing on historic sideshow posters. An accompanying sound piece, “Ball Game” (2009), consisted of play-by-play announcements for a fictional baseball game whose action Kerbel crafted to be the most statistically average game possible.
Wermers, meanwhile, was born in Germany in 1970 and splits her time between London and her hometown of Emsdetten. In 2013, she was commissioned to create a permanent project for Tate Britain’s refurbished cafe, Members Room, and Rex Whistler Restaurant. She produced a two-sided spoon, titled “Manners,” which has been steadily disappearing from the Tate eateries ever since. For her 2012 solo show at New York’s Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Wermers showed a series of shelf-like sculptures holding shallow pools of water and photographs shot at the Rodin Museum in Paris.
By far the underdog of the 2015 Turner Prize race, Bonnie Chaplin was born in London in 1970 and, after specializing in video and film at Central Saint Martins, spent a decade as a dancer, promoter, director, and DJ in the Soho club scene. Her practice takes many forms, including sculpture, pen and pencil drawings, watercolor paintings, installation, film, and video. She is also a member, with Ed Liq, Enrico David, and 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, of the band donAteller.
Other past recipients of the Turner Prize, which was first given (to US-based British painter Malcolm Morley) in 1984, include Gilbert & George (1986), Tony Cragg (1988), Anish Kapoor (1991), Rachel Whiteread (1993), Antony Gormley (1994), Damien Hirst (1995), Douglas Gordon (1996), Chris Offili (1998), Wolfgang Tillmans (2000), Jake and Dinos Chapman (2003), Jeremy Deller (2004), Susan Philipsz (2010), and Laure Prouvost (2013).
