Turner Prize 2018 ShortList Announced

Artists Naeem Mohaiemen and Luke Willis Thompson are two of the four shortlisted nominees for the 2018 Turner Prize. Tate Britain made the announcement on April 25 about the annual prize for artists born or working primarily in Britain. The other two shortlisted names are the Goldsmiths College-based collective Forensic Architecture and Glasgow moving-image artist Charlotte Prodger.

London-born Mohaiemen grew up in Dhaka and now lives in New York, where he is working on a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University. In 2017, he premiered two new films as part of Documenta 14 programming: in Athens, Tripoli Cancelled (2017), a story about a man stranded at the former Athens international airport, loosely based on an experience of his father’s; and in Kassel, a three-channel documentary about the Non-Aligned Movement, Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017). He also premiered a live-performance essay titled Muhammad Ali’s Bangladesh Passport (2017) as part of Documenta’s public programs, and Volume Eleven (Flaw in the Algorithm of Cosmopolitanism) (2017), a series of diptychs in Documenta 14’s journal South as a State of Mind. Mohaeimen’s solo exhibition “There is No Last Man,” opened in October at MoMA PS1 and featured these four related works.

Luke Willis Thompson, born in Auckland and a resident of London, was nominated for his exhibition “Autoportrait” at Chisenhale, London, which featured a black-and-white 35mm portrait of Diamond Reynolds, who had live-streamed her boyfriend Philando Castile’s fatal shooting by a Minnesota police officer, Jeronimo Yanez (later acquitted of manslaughter), at a traffic stop. The film captures Reynolds in two, four-minute-long takes, and exists only in film format.

The jury for the 2018 edition comprises Kunsthalle Basel director Elena Filipovic, art critic Oliver Basciano, Holt-Smithson Foundation executive director Lisa Le Feuvre; and novelist Tom McCarthy. Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, is the jury chair. An exhibition of the shortlisted artists opens September 25 at Tate Britain, in London, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in December.

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