Pio Abad, Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas will compete for the £25,000 prize, while the nominated artists will each collect £10,000 as the prize returns to Tate Britain for the first time in six years.
Colonialism, migration, nationalism and identity politics are the key themes running through the 40th edition of the Turner prize, which the jury described as showing contemporary British art “is appealing and dynamic as ever”.
Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner prize jury, said this year’s nominees were exploring ideas of identity and would be exhibited from 25 September, before the jury’s final choice.
He said: “This year’s shortlisted artists can be broadly characterised as exploring questions of identity, autobiography, community and the self in relation to memory, or history or myth.”
The Turner prize, regarded as one of the art world’s most prestigious awards, is presented to an artist born or working in Britain for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work over the previous year.
Abad was nominated for his solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, with the jury commenting on the “precision and elegance” of his work, which takes its title from a Mark Twain poem of a similar name that critiques American imperialism the Philippines, his homeland.
The show also contains references to the Benin Bronzes, after Abad discovered that the punitive expedition of 1897 – during which British troops sacked Benin City and looted thousands of objects, of which about 900 are in the British Museum’ – set off from his home, Woolwich, in south London.
She is the latest black female artist who emerged in the Black Art Movement of the 1980s to be recognised by the Turner prize, following in the footsteps of Lubaina Himid (2017 winner) and Veronica Ryan (2022), while Ingrid Pollard and Barbara Walker have both been nominated.
The jury said Johnson had been nominated because of the “renewal of her practice”, after she stopped making work in the 1990s, and the fact she was still “taking risks and trying new forms of practice”.
Kaur’s work in the exhibition Alter Altar, which was shown at Tramway in Glasgow, features sculptures and soundscapes, including a red Ford Escort covered in a huge doily, which references her father’s first car and ideas of migration and belonging in Britain.
Kaur grew up in Glasgow’s Sikh community in Pollokshields, and the jury said the exhibition was a breakout show that was “generous, celebratory, moving and alive to timely issues, speaking imaginatively to how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism, division and social control”.
Le Bas’s work, shown at the Vienna Secession exhibition, was described as a “response to social and political turmoil” and includes immersive performance art with theatrical costumes and sculptures.
Farquharson said there was a chance the show may travel to Bradford during its City of Culture year, following the precedent set by Coventry, which hosted the awards in 2021, although that was still “to be confirmed”.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
