Naeem Mohaiemen mesmerises with a man in limbo while Forensic Architecture speaks truth to power in a terrific year for the Turner prize. Elsewhere, 20 artists conjure beauty at its most illusory
By turns shattering, absorbing, beguiling, highly political, frequently momentous: this is the best Turner prize show in years. All the shortlisted works are moving images, in both senses; some filmed on stately 35mm stock, others using cameras attached to kites, or simply shot on smartphones. The uniformity of medium – no painting, sculpture, installation or anything else – is a reflection of the decisions of the four-person jury alone, as always, not a portrait of the contemporary art scene. But it would be hard to avoid the obvious intersection between these works and the maelstrom of modern times: they are like dark reflecting mirrors.
Naeem Mohaiemen, London-born to Bengali parents, is showing two enthralling films, geopolitical romances in a tragic vein. One is a complex musing on the failure of socialism in developing countries, focusing on the long march of radical leaders through the UN – from Indira Gandhi to Arafat and Bhutto – collaging old and new footage to eerie effect. The pensive Indian historian Vijay Prashad draws the past into the present, most dramatically in a scene where he wanders among the vast receding avenues of archive drawers, now empty, where the history of countries and conflicts used to be filed. One could chance upon knowledge quite spontaneously, like life itself; now everything is determined by computer.
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