Top art prize contest takes an adult turn

Four artists – Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards and Tris Vonna-Michell – have been shortlisted for the annual contemporary art prize.

Cardiff-born Richards, 31, is showing Rosebud 2013, 
his film which includes partially censored, erotic images 
from a book found in a Tokyo library.

His footage is described as “poetic meditations on the pleasure, sensuality and the voyeurism that is in the act of looking.”

Three of the four artists shortlisted are showing film.

Vonna-Michell’s film Finding Chopin: Dans l’Essex (2014), features salt marshes and the Essex coastline and is inspired by a French sound poet who spent part of his life in Essex, close to where the 31-year-old artist grew up.

Dublin-born Campbell’s films – one of which lasts almost an hour – tackle African art and colonialism and equations from Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1.

Curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas said that all the shortlisted artists tackled a “lack of fixed meaning” in the world around them in their work.

The predominant use of film in the show responded to “how we navigate the world increasingly through images”, she added.

“The internet changed the way that we interact with each other. It’s only natural that the artists respond to that.”

Visitors who do not like sitting through the whole of a film work do not need to watch the full film on display, she said.

The prize, awarded to an artist under 50 born, living or working Britain, will be presented tomorrow. The Turner Prize 2014 exhibition opens today at Tate Britain and runs to January 4 next year.