This film touches on issues that are painfully real – but is it art?
This year’s exhibition for Britain’s best known art prize consists almost entirely of film, and offers what its judges have described as the award’s “most political” shortlist to date. A list appropriate to these troubled times? You’d certainly hope so, with the four contenders squaring up to such issues as state-sanctioned murder, police brutality, migration, failed utopias and gender identity.
By far the most hard-hitting piece comes from Forensic Architecture, a group of researchers, based at Goldsmiths, who use video, scale models and text to investigate allegations of state violence.
Here, they focus on killings that took place in 2017, during the removal of a Bedouin village in the Negev desert by Israeli police. Large-screen video footage plunges you into the chaos of this event – all flashing lights, shouts and sirens – during which a local Arab man (a maths teacher) and an Israeli policeman were killed. The group used digital analysis of these images to refute the official version of events: that the teacher was shot while attempting to drive his car at police.
Despite the blatant anti-israeli bias (though Forensic Architecture’s director Eyal Weizman is Israeli) this is a compelling presentation, touching on painfully real issues about which, you’re left feeling, we should all know far more than we do. Yet while it is technically innovative and undeniably thought-provoking, does it employ the imaginative function or question the nature of its own structures and materials enough to be considered art? Or does the mere fact that it is forcing us to ask these questions somehow make it art?
The other contestants’ work is more personal, though no less ambitious in scale. Tripoli Cancelled is based on a real-life incident in which British-born, Bangladesh-raised artist Naeem Mohaiemen’s father was confined to Tripoli airport for nine days after losing his passport. While the film is beautifully shot, with a wonderful feeling for the crumbling surfaces of the abandoned Sixties building in which it is shot, the comic potential of the original anecdote is lost in an over-extended anti-narrative that loses sight of its purpose, leaving only a vague sense of existential aimlessness. A scene in which the protagonist, in his cream suit, dances alone in a vast, deserted concourse to a Boney M cassette is neither as sad nor funny as it should be.
Filmed entirely on a mobile phone, Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT is more intimate in scope: a poetic video-diary looking back on her teenage experience of coming out, while reflecting on the Celtic goddess of the title. Comprised of long takes on near-random images – from bleak grey seas to a cat sticking its head in an anglepoise lamp – it’s not without moments of warmth, humour and beauty, but obtusely fails to cohere
with the languid voice-over and is hardly an obvious contender for this major award. New Zealand-born Luke Willis Thompson, at 30 the youngest (and to my mind the weakest) of the contestants, presents portraits of the relatives of black people killed during police operations in America and Britain, including Diamond Reynolds, who became famous in 2016 after a moving address to her phone-camera, made in the moments after her boyfriend was fatally shot by Minnesota police, was aired on Facebook.
While Thompson’s intention is to provide an alternative to the hyped way such events are presented in the mainstream media, he might have attempted something more ambitious than static filmed portraits, of which too many have already been made.
While I’m not entirely convinced of Forensic Architecture’s intentions, which carry more than a whiff of intellectual dandyism, or that they’ve fully grasped the aesthetic possibilities of their material, none the less, if you want a hair-prickling sense of the conflicts of our time brought directly into the gallery, they’re the only real contenders for this year’s Prize.
Overall, for all its claims to political relevance, its tone this year is wistful and detached. The reliance, too, on digital media creates a clinical ambience that leaves you nostalgic for messy, old-fashioned art materials such as paint, clay and plaster. If the future of art is going to be all about watching videos in darkened rooms, God help us.
Sept 26 until Jan 6; 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk