Turner Prize 2023 Opens at Towner Eastbourne

Featuring work by Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim, Jesse Darling, and Barbara Walker, this year’s Turner Prize centres on work that explores humanity and vulnerability.

The exhibition, on view at Towner Eastbourne from 28 September 2023 to 14 April 2024, designates separate rooms for each artist’s remarkably different practice.

Starting on the ground floor, Ghislaine Leung‘s ventilation piping installation Violets 2 (2018) awkwardly cuts across the space. Meanwhile, heavy streams of water gush against a steel vessel in Fountains (2022). Interested in production and practice, Leung’s work adapts and changes depending on its environment. Leung frequently shows at non-profit spaces—in 2024 she will have an exhibition at The Renaissance Society in Chicago—but she also exhibits with Maxwell Graham in New York.

Upstairs, Rory Pilgrim‘s film RAFTS (2022) floods the space with spoken word and song. Made up of interspersed interviews, songs, and poetry readings by residents of Barking and Dagenham from Green Shoes Arts (a project for socially deprived and vulnerable people), the film is a moving reflection on the importance of creativity amid challenging times. Pilgrim is represented by andriesse - eyck galerie in Amsterdam and in June joined Maureen Paley in London.

Jesse Darling, who shows with Arcadia Missa in London, Chapter NY in New York, Galerie Molitor in Berlin, and Galerie Sultana in Paris, absorbs us in a broken and battered world. His installation of new and recent sculptures set out warped railway tracks (reminiscent of rollercoaster rides), tangles of hazard tape, and wonky Union Jack flags and is a commentary on the fragility of today’s systems of power.

Speaking to Ocula Magazine in 2022, he said, ‘I’ve learned to trust that objects and materiality in themselves are sometimes smarter and more eloquent than I could ever be.’

Finally, Barbara Walker‘s monumental portraits of subjects affected by the Windrush scandal highlight the importance of giving heed to different people’s experiences, particularly in a world laden with social, cultural, economic, and political issues. Walker shows with Cristea Roberts Gallery in London.

Nomination for Britain’s most prestigious contemporary art prize will no doubt boost the market for all four artists, and especially the winner, when they’re named on 5 December.

Main image: Lothar Götz, _Dance Diagonal _(2019). Brewers Towner Commission, Towner Eastbourne. Photo: Eva Eastman.