OCA Study Vist to Hull International Photography Festival and Turner Prize 2018

Many thanks to OCA colleagues Hazel Bingham and Nicola Hampshire for organising this student led Study Visit to HIP and the Turner Prize.  One of the best aspects of study visits is the communication and bouncing of ideas with other people.  Visiting an exhibition is worthwhile in its own right but with a group of fellow students it reaches new dimensions.

The Turner Prize, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull

I actually visited this exhibition three times; a brief previsit a week before the OCA event and then later to take in aspects that I wanted to see (video) or see again.  Four very different artists were represented and I enjoyed them all in their own way.  The first we looked at as a group was the video Vivian's Garden by:-

Rosalind Nashashibi, a Palestinian-English artist based in Liverpool.  She was born in 1973 to a Pelestinian father and an English mother.  Although she works in paint and print, her main work is in analogue 16mm film which is then transferred to digital imagery.  Her films are often meditative and sensuous and utilise an array of filmic conventions.

Vivian's Garden 

tells the story of the relationship between two artists who are mother and daughter.  They live in connected houses and share a wild and overgrown garden in Panajachel, Guatamala along with villagers who act as servants and guardians.  This is filmed beautifully and reminded me of a series of still set piece images, somewhat like a tableau.  There is obvious care and affection for their servants but the power dynamics are obvious.  The film dwells on nostalgia and memory with many metaphors for memory - perhaps the overgrown, dark jungle of a garden represents their darker memories whereas they are now creating new ones.

Electrical Gaza

I returned at a later date to see Electrical Gaza which was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record life on Gaza in 2015.  It combines real life scenes with animations which are blended seamlessly.  It portrays everyday life in Gaza rather than the violent images we are so used to seeing.  It begns and ends, though with footage of the border crossing showing how difficult it is for the population to move freely.

Hurvin Anderson's work comprises large scale paintings.  I really liked them and felt that of all of the work displayed I would have had this on my walls which probably means he isn't going to win.  It was the most conventional of all of the artists represented.  He was born in Birmingham in 1965 and his vibrant paintings use still-life, landscape and portraiture to explore the way that community and identity can be represented being of black Jamaican descent.

Unlike colleague Rob Townsend, I preferred his large scale landscapes to his portraiture.

Andrea Buttner  was born in Stuttgart on 1972 and works with print, sculpture, painting, film and collaborative projects.  Her work for The Turner Prize consited of images from such well-known photographers as Ansel Adams, Andrei Kertesz and  August Sander juxtaposed with writings from French philosopher, mystic and political activist Simone Weil.  I found the work difficult to understand and found myself being drawn to the photographs instead and I am sure that this was not the objective of the piece.

Born in 1954 in Zanzibar, Ludaina Hamid is professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire.  Her work celebrates Black creativity through paint, print, drawing and installations.  She looks at the slave trade and the institutional invisibility of the people of the African diaspora.  

 A Fashionable Marriage is inspired by the work of William Hogarth and features a stage set with figures taken from his morality tale.  It comprises painting, drawing and collage on the cut-outs and relates to our current political climate and includes newspaper headlines and images of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

Another unusual and quirky exhibit, Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service (2007) she paints amusing scenes and speech directly onto china crockery to tell the story of slavery in Britain.

In Negative Positives she paints directly onto pages from the Guardian newspaper to highlight in an amusing and satirical way that Black people are represented in the media.  As one of our members suggested 'even the Guardian can be racist without even realising it'.

I managed to see the exhibition three times before the winner was announced and I was pleased to hear that it was Hamid.

I have seen the Turner Prize exhibition on other occasions in London and not enjoyed it, wondering what it was all about.  One of the things that I take from my degree course is that I am much more open minded and can enjoy contemporary art even if I don't understand it.  As colleague Rob Townsend says 'we can enjoy work in our own way and find it satisfying even if that isn't the artist's intention; very Death of an Author'.