Turner Prize 2014

This year’s Turner Prize aka £25,000 will be given out on December 1st to the rightful winner, one of the four finalists whose exhibitions are currently being held at the Tate Britain.

With three of the four competing pieces being film-based, it’s proven that us the viewers may find it necessary to invest as much manoeuvre into understanding the pieces as the artists did making them, given the unanimous verdict from major critics that this year’s entries are oblique and timid. Perhaps in this political climate where daily papers have been blasting stories on child abuse, plane crashes, beheadings, dismantling of our country, either we are out of capacity to react to shock art that some of the previous Turner Prize buzz-generating artists such as Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin have unveiled or contemporary artists have lost the will to shock. Even Turner Prize’s archenemy – Stucklists who have protested every year at the Prize decided to take a break this year, the least shocking bit of the whole ordeal. Britain is at such a fragile state and this year’s four finalists Duncan Campbell, Ciara Philips, Tris Vonna-Michell, and James Richards (who has been tipped as the likely winner for his film collage – Rosebud) may have just produced the art in reaction to this. As much as we miss the eccentricity of our Turner Prize artists, this year we will get sensuality for a change.

Photos by Abigail Yue Wang