Turner Prize 2017

This year’s Turner Prize will be known tonight:

The Turner Prize is awarded annually to an artist born, living or working in Britain, for an outstanding exhibition or public presentation of their work anywhere in the world in the previous year.

The four shortlisted artists for the Turner Prize 2017 are:

• Hurvin Anderson
• Andrea Büttner 
• Lubaina Himid
• Rosalind Nashashibi

Since 2011 the Turner Prize has been staged outside of London every other year. For 2017 it will be presented at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull as part of the UK City of Culture 2017 programme. 

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Since it was established in 1984 the Turner Prize has become one of the most prestigious international visual arts awards and has both reflected and contributed to a growing public awareness and interest in contemporary art. 

The members of the Turner Prize 2017 jury are:

• Dan Fox, Co-Editor at Frieze
• Martin Herbert, art critic
• Mason Leaver-Yap, Walker Art Center’s Bentson Scholar of Moving Image in Minneapolis, and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin
• Emily Pethick, Director, Showroom

The jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain.

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My bet:

Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid
Naming the Money 2004
Installation view of Navigation Charts, Spike Island, Bristol 2017
Courtesy of the artist, Hollybush Gardens, and National Museums, Liverpool
Photo: Stuart Whipps

Lubaina Himid, 2017
Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens
Photo: Edmund Blok for Modern Art Oxford

Lubaina Himid was born in 1954 in Zanzibar, Tanzania. She studied Theatre Design at Wimbledon College of Art and an M.A in Cultural History at the Royal College of Art. She is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. Recent solo exhibitions include Navigation Charts, Spike Island, Bristol, UK and Invisible Strategies, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK (both 2017). Recent group exhibitions include The Place is Here, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2017); The 1980s Today’s Beginnings?, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2016); Keywords, Tate Liverpool, UK (2014); and Burning Down the House, Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2014). From 1986–1990 Himid was director of the Elbow Room and has curated exhibitions including Carte de Visite, Hollybush Gardens, London, UK (2015); The Thin Black Line, ICA, London, UK (1986); and Critical, Donald Rodney, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale, UK (1989).

Himid makes paintings, prints, drawings and installations which celebrate Black creativity and the people of the African diaspora while challenging institutional invisibility. She references the slave industry and its legacies, and addresses the hidden and neglected cultural contribution made by real but forgotten people. In Naming the Money 2014, 100 cut-out life size figures depict Black servants and labourers who Himid individualises, giving each of them a name and story to work against the sense of the powerless mass. She often takes her paintings off the gallery wall so that her images become objects that surround the viewer. Whether working on Guardian newspapers or directly onto porcelain tableware, Himid continually subjects painting to the material of everyday life in order to explore Black identity. 

Himid repeatedly questions the historical role of portraiture, as in works such as A Fashionable Marriage 1987, recently exhibited in The Place is Here at Nottingham Contemporary (2017). Inspired by William Hogarth’s Marriage a la Mode 4 (The Countess’s Morning Levee) 1743, this installation features a brightly coloured stage set with a cast of characters taken from Hogarth’s morality tale. Incorporating painting, drawing and collage on cut-outs, the installation relates its historical inspiration to our current climate by including contemporary newspaper headlines and images of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Himid’s satirical approach takes aim at the politics of the time as well as its legacy today. In works such as these, the artist appropriates and interrogates European painters and combines aspects of her African heritage to question the role of visual power.

Alongside her artistic practice Himid has curated exhibitions to showcase underrepresented Black artists. As an artist, advocate and curator she has facilitated and celebrated the role of Black artists and their contributions to contemporary society.

Lubaina Himid is 62 and lives and works in Preston.

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Link: Tate Modern

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/ferens-art-gallery/exhibition/turner-prize-2017