The Turner Prize 2015 has been awarded to Assemble for their collective initiatives that experiment in art, design and architecture. The Artist, musician and songwriter Kim Gordon presented this year’s award. Gordon is a founding member of the band Sonic Youth and a current member, with Bill Nace, of the guitar duo Body/Head. The Turner Prize is presented annually to a British artist under fifty years old who has exhibited outstanding work in the UK the previous year. This is the first time the UK’s most prestigious arts prize has been presented in Scotland. Winners of the prize, which has been presented in London in alternate years, receive a cheque for £25,000.
This year the awards ceremony was held at Tramway, Glasgow, and broadcast live to the public on Channel 4 at 7.30pm. The Turner Prize 2015 exhibition runs until 17 January 2016 and features work by the four nominated artists (in alphabetical order): Assemble; Bonnie Camplin; Janice Kerbel and Nicole Wermers.
The members of the Turner Prize 2015 jury were Alistair Hudson, Director, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art; Kyla McDonald, Artistic Director, Glasgow Sculpture Studios; Joanna Mytkowska, Director, Museum Sztuki Nowoczesnej; and Jan Verwoert, critic and curator. The jury is chaired by Penelope Curtis, Director, Tate Britain.
The Tramway is an international art-space which commissions, produces and presents contemporary arts projects. Its vision is to inspire and add to our understanding of today’s world by connecting audiences and artists. It is a multi-arts venue in a former tram depot which was transformed for Glasgow as European capital of culture in 1990.
Assemble For projects include the ongoing collaboration with local residents and others in the Granby Four Streets, Liverpool. Assemble are a London-based collective who work across the fields of art, design and architecture to create projects in tandem with the communities who use and inhabit them. Their architectural spaces and environments promote direct action and embrace a DIY sensibility.
Other Shortlisted artists were, Bonnie Camplin For The Military Industrial Complex, South London Gallery. Bonnie Camplin’s practice, which she broadly describes as ‘the Invented Life,’ is characterised by the critique of existing power-structures, and spans the disciplines of drawing, film, performance, music and writing. The Military Industrial Complex 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.
Janice Kerbel For her operatic work DOUG, commissioned by The Common Guild at Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Kerbel borrows from conventional modes of narrative in order to create elaborate imagined forms. Her precisely crafted works often take the form of audio recordings, performance and printed matter. DOUG is a performative work which takes the form of nine songs for six voices.
Nicole Wermers For her exhibition Infrastruckur, Herald Street, London. Nicole Wermers creates sculptures, collages and installations which explore the appropriation of art and design within consumer culture. Her installation Infrastruktur adopted the glossy aesthetics and materials of modernist design and high fashion, alluding to themes of lifestyle, class, consumption and control.