Turner Prize exhibition 2022: speculative fiction, intimacy and untold histories

The Turner Prize 2022 exhibition is now open at Tate Liverpool, with the winner being announced at St George’s Hall on 7 December 2022. Spread across seven rooms on the gallery’s top floor are immersive inquiries into race, gender and maternalism from the prize’s four nominees: Heather Phillipson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan and Sin Wai Kin. 

Who is your winner? 

Heather Phillipson

In a new iteration of her Tate Britain show earlier this year, ‘Rupture No 6: biting the blowtorched peach’, Heather Phillipson’s Turner Prize 2022 installation comprises a staggering display of sound and sculpture. On entry to the gallery space, we are flanked by screens presenting colourful close-ups of familiar natural forms. Phillipson's work comments on our impact on nature and makes use of used materials to create fictional bugs and a corrugated iron shack, formulating a post-apocalyptic sculptural landscape of intrusive sound and burning skies. Headphones hang from the ceiling and relay excerpts from radio stations and TV shows talking about environmental disasters. 

Veronica Ryan

Veronica Ryan’s room of hanging relics is a shift into relative calm after the vibrant chaos of Phillipson. Her naturally dyed crocheted sacks (which Ryan appears to make prolifically, as we see in her introduction video), hang in orange, yellow, pink and black from attachments on the ceiling and walls. Ryan has filled them with dried avocado stones, seeds and lumps of wax and plaster. Some of the crochet containers, divulges Sarah James, senior curator of Tate Liverpool, ‘have casts of the artist’s nipples in them’, offering powerful imagery of femininity in a show that references childhood memories and maternalism.

Sin Wai Kin

A coalescence of contemporary gender dysmorphic experience, and speaking potently to a seminal cultural moment, Sin Wai Kin’s 23-minute-long video A Dream of Wholeness in Parts, 2021, depicts a surreal series of landscapes. The video takes us through crashing waves in a distant background to warmly lit rooms and striking depictions of femininity. It's overlaid with a monologue and draws on speculative fiction: a banyan tree speaks to the protagonist in a poetic dialogue that runs over detail shots of a body embellished with jewellery and paint, and a bowl of noodles talks to us through twitches in its pixelation. Kin’s show offers an insight into gender dysmorphia through science fiction and drag, utilising a fictional boy band to represent ‘the multiplicity of one body’, as they explain. 

Ingrid Pollard

Pollard lines the spaces holding her works at Tate Liverpool with a strong air of discomfort. In the back room, there are three contraptions, swinging and jolting to throw screeches into the air in Bow Down and Very Low-123, 2021. The sculptures are surrounded by prints depicting a young girl, curtsying in the works’ print counterpart. There is a mood of expectation in Deny: Imagine: Attack: Silence, 1991/2019, and of a struggle with meeting it. There is a rebellion in her pieces, and a picking apart of British culture, and the meaning of race means within it, explored through the emblem of the ‘Black Boy’ through the show.

The Turner Prize 2022 exhibition runs until 19 March 2023 at Tate Liverpool. tate.org.uk