Turner Prize 2010 Exhibition

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oFeU-AC8hY

A painting about the horrors of Falluja is among the works in the 2010 Turner prize exhibition, which opens to the public tomorrow at Tate Britain.

The new work, by Dexter Dalwood, is titled White Flag, a reference to the famous Jasper Johns painting of the same name. In fact, the American artist's whited-out stars and stripes are transformed into a forbidding blank wall in Dalwood's picture.

Part of the imagery in the painting is derived from a video game – which was withdrawn from sale – called Six Days In Fallujah, which aimed to recreate the notorious 2004 Iraq war battle from the point of view of a US marine. Dalwood also references the lush orientalism of Delacroix's Women of Algiers, with a section of the painting richly painted with images of slippers and fine carpets.

Dalwood's unpeopled, meticulously researched paintings are, according to Turner prize exhibition co-curator Katherine Stout, "visual testaments to individual moments in history" – a kind of modern equivalent of the grand history paintings of the 19th century, but packed with references and direct quotes from art of the past, and are "evoking a feeling", according to Stout, rather than providing a direct narrative.

He also shows a work called The Death of David Kelly, which imagines the moonlit spot at which the weapons expert committed suicide in 2003; and another titled Greenham Common.

The other artists on a shortlist described by co-curator Helen Little as "highly rigorous and mature" are the film-makers and collaborators the Otolith Group, painter Angela de la Cruz, and sculptor and sound artist Susan Philipsz. Little said that on a shortlist notable for its diversity of work – ranging from painting to sculpture and from video to sound art – what drew the artists together was an intense questioning of the "limits of their own medium".

For instance, the other painter on the shortlist – the 2010 prize is unusual in having two painters in contention – deliberately damages and breaks her own canvases to transform her works into a kind of sculpture. Little says the Spanish-born De la Cruz is asking: "When is a painting not a painting?" For one work, Deflated IX, she removes a painted canvas from its stretcher altogether and hangs it from a hook, "like a coat from a wall", according to Little. De la Cruz has made a number of works under the collective title Clutter, one of which appears in the show, that recycle old canvases hanging around in her studio. They appear as unruly, dishevelled stacks on the floor, more sculpture than painting, and perhaps a humorous reminder that paintings are, in the end, just "stuff".

Philipsz has recreated a sound work for Tate Britain that was heard this summer under the bridges of the Clyde in her native Glasgow. Strongly tipped as a serious contender to win the prize, the Berlin-based artist recorded herself singing three versions of a traditional Scottish lament, which were then heard drifting over the gloomy waters of the river. For the version at Tate Britain, the visitor will enter a room completely empty but for three speakers.

The Otolith Group – Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar – question the role and appeal of film. One of their pieces for the exhibition is titled Inner Time of Television – which is, in fact, an installation on 13 screens of a 13-part television programme about ancient Greece called The Owl's Legacy. Made by French film-maker Chris Marker, it was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1989 – an experimental and boldly intellectual programme, according to the artists, that "could never be broadcast on British television today".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/oct/04/turner-prize-tate-bri...