Turner Prize 2023 exhibition unwrapped: inside Towner Eastbourne

The Turner Prize 2023 exhibition has opened at Towner Eastbourne. Wrapped in a vibrant coat of paint by the German artist Lothar Götz, the gallery is the technicolour stage for the work of this year’s Turner Prize nominees: Barbara Walker, Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung and Rory Pilgrim. Across three floors, the artists use personal narratives and the vulnerability of the body to critique power structures and inequalities, while making rallying cries for change, empathy and care.

Turner Prize 2023 exhibition at Towner Eastbourne

The most straight-talking work is Barbara Walker’s Burden of Proof, nominated for its first incarnation at the Sharjah Biennial 15. It brings visibility to the individuals and families affected by the UK’s 2017 scandal that saw people from the Windrush generation, who had travelled from Commonwealth countries, wrongly denied their lawful immigration status.

As you approach her installation, towering charcoal portraits of those who shared their stories with Walker confront you before you even enter the room, visible through the door on the back wall of the gallery. They were drawn directly onto the wall in her tender, naturalistic hand – only to be wiped away by the artist at the end of the show, in a nod to the victims’ historic erasure by the government.

Portraits of the victims also overlay hand-drawn copies of documents used to prove their right to remain in the UK. Their charcoal silhouettes vie for attention with the banal text of official forms and employment records, sometimes rendering it illegible, with one man even bursting beyond the document’s boundaries in what feels like an act of defiance. 

In Walker’s hands, drawing is a simple yet potent tool to convey her message.

Notions of nationhood and borders also come to the fore in the dystopian work of Jesse Darling, nominated for his show ‘Enclosures’ at Camden Art Centre and ‘No Medals, No Ribbons’ at Modern Art Oxford. At Towner Easterbourne, the spirit of the two is melded together, re-energised with new works that reference the context, such as the Union Jacks that Darling noticed proliferate in the coastal town. ‘Enclosures’ spoke of boundaries and the privatisation of space – echoed here in the thresholds of the gallery, reimagined as checkpoints with concrete pillars and barbed wire. 

Darling often imbues the materials of everyday life, governments and society with human vulnerabilities to suggest that the systems of power and religion are as fragile as the body itself. In Come on England (2023), steel crowd control barriers seem to go rogue through the gallery, rising up on their metal legs, then slumping and collapsing. In another work, they appear to climb the wall. The nanny state, it seems, has lost the plot.

Human frailty, resilience and the power of community resound in Rafts, Rory Pilgrim’s collaboration with members of Green Shoes Arts, a London organisation for socially deprived and vulnerable people. The film is a seven-song oratorio narrated by residents of Barking and Dagenham that reflects on the idea of a raft as a symbol of support keeping us afloat in tough times. It was made during the pandemic, with the original film presented at the Serpentine in 2022 and Rafts: Live being performed at London’s Cadogan Hall with the help of the London Contemporary Orchestra. The Towner Eastbourne film splices these presentations together.

You can’t fail to be moved by the teenagers dancing together with wild abandon on an athletics track or the artist who speaks of dreams as her ‘oar of courage’ in difficult moments, but a few years on from the pandemic, exclamations about the healing power of creativity and a visit to the park don’t land with quite the same impact as they might have done when first shown. 

The most dramatic intervention to Towner Eastbourne comes from Ghislaine Leung, whose metal ventilation pipes dissect the gallery, rising up the wall. The noise of a fountain reverberates through the space, with water splashing on the floor.

Leung has developed a system of ‘scored-based artworks’, which come with short text instructions for how they should be presented by the gallery team. With Fountains (2022), it simply reads, ‘A fountain installed in the exhibition space to cancel sound’, with the finer details left to the institution. When shown at Simian Gallery in Copenhagen, Fountains was made by diverting water from a manmade lake above the art space and funnelling it through the roof so that it crashed onto the gallery floor. Here the simple, round fountain, with its internal circulatory system, is somewhat less spectacular. 

In a show that confronts the crises of today and speaks to the human in all of us, Leung’s critique on the conditions of art production and how work is distributed feels like an artworld in-joke, albeit an intriguing idea. The fountain might cancel sound but it somewhat silences the heart in this otherwise rousing exhibition.

Turner Prize 2023 exhibition is at Towner Eastbourne, 28 September 2023 – 14 April 2024, townereastbourne.org.uk