Turner Prize winner announced in Liverpool

Dec 3 2007

Mark Wallinger, the artist whose work includes dressing up as a bear, has won this year’s Turner Prize for his replica of the one-man anti-war protest in Parliament Square.

He scooped the controversial contemporary art prize for his painstaking recreation of protester Brian Haw’s 40-metre encampment outside Parliament.

Wallinger, 48, was favourite to win the £25,000 prize for his £90,000 installation, entitled State Britain, which recreates everything from Haw’s tarpaulin shelter and tea-making area to the messages of support and hand-painted placards.

Critics praised Wallinger for pulling off a “political coup” by reinstating the tent and placards, seized by police in May, within Tate Britain.

For the Turner Prize exhibition, Wallinger hogged the headlines with a film, Sleeper, in which he dressed in a bear suit and wondered around a gallery in Berlin over a period of ten nights.

He said the title referred to Cold War spies and that he was inspired by a film of a fairy tale about a prince turned into a bear he saw as a child.

Tonight’s prize was for State Britain, which the jury commended for its “immediacy, visceral intensity and historic importance”.

They said: “The work combines a bold political statement with art’s ability to articulate fundamental human truths.”

The winner was announced at Tate Liverpool and presented by Easy Rider actor Dennis Hopper.

A further £5,000 went to each of the shortlisted artists, Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, and Mike Nelson, who the jury commended for their “outstanding presentations” at the show in Tate Liverpool.

Coley was nominated for cardboard sculptures of a church, a mosque and a synagogue that are camouflaged to show the similarities between the faiths.

Bhimji was shortlisted for images from Uganda demonstrating the grief and loss felt by Asians who were expelled by Idi Amin.

Only Nelson avoided direct politics with a nomination for a series of underground “hidden rooms”, touching on the loneliness and hard grind suffered by artists.

In recent years, the prize has been won by a light that flickered on and off and vases with pornographic decoration made by a transvestite potter.

The Turner Prize, established in 1984, is awarded to a British artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of his or her work in the 12 months before May this year.

The winner was announced at Tate Liverpool - the first time it has been held outside London - as a curtain-raiser for the city’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008.

Wallinger, from the Sensation generation of British artists, made the shortlist in 1995, but lost out to Damien Hirst.

In May last year dozens of placards erected by lone protester Haw in Parliament Square were seized by police in a controversial raid.

Wallinger is also known for Ecce Homo (1999), a life-size Christ figure crowned with barbed-wire thorns that temporarily occupied The Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.

He is said to have employed 15 people for six months to make State Britain.

Haw began his protest against the economic sanction in Iraq in June 2001.

On May 23 2006, following the passing by Parliament of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act prohibiting unauthorised demonstrations within a one kilometre radius of Parliament Square, the majority of Haw’s protest was removed.