Turner Prize 2023: Community as Both Bond and Barrier

The Turner Prize 2023 exhibition at Towner Eastbourne features nominees Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim, Jesse Darling, and Barbara Walker, all exploring community's dual nature. Leung's 'Scores' involve text-based instructions realized by gallery staff, with works like 'Fountains' (2022) and 'Hours' (2022) highlighting symbiotic support networks. Pilgrim's hour-long film 'RAFTS' (2021), made with Green Shoes Arts in Barking and Dagenham, documents a pandemic project where participants used poetry, music, and storytelling to reflect on rafts as support structures, performed at Cadogan Hall with London Contemporary Orchestra. Darling's installation includes a barbed wire arch checkpoint, metal barricades, Union Jack bunting, concrete-stuffed binders, and a railing punching through a wall, critiquing Brexit's exclusionary nationalism. Walker's large-scale charcoal portraits and works on paper depict Windrush scandal victims, with documents overlapping faces to show how bureaucracy embeds in identity. The exhibition runs at Towner Eastbourne until 2024.