A Guide to the Turner Prize 2026

From an elephant in its death throes to mist-enshrouded armatures, this year’s Turner Prize brings four urgent visions of the present to Middlesbrough

Opening every autumn, the exhibition for the yearly Turner Prize in many ways marks UK art’s back to school moment with a showcase of four dynamic art practices that speak to the chaotic particularities of the present. The iconic annual showcase that introduced the British public to Tracey Emin’s unmade bed in 1999 and Rachel Whiteread's life-sized cast of a house in 1993 is back for its 42nd edition, this year at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. The shortlisted artists – Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku – have been selected on the basis of a recent solo exhibition or performance. All are UK-born, aside French-born, London-based Marguerite Humeau, and all are presenting sculptural works in an array of materials ranging from scaffolding to tailor’s chalk, wasp venom to vapour. Each presentation is a powerful, sometimes uncanny, take on subjects as seemingly far-flung and yet circuitously related as shared consciousness, resource extraction, postwar industry in the north of England, and the agony and ecstasy of being. The winner is announced in December and bookies will already have their favourites. Below is AnOther’s guide to the show.  

Marguerite Humeau’s Torches is the first of the ground-floor presentations to greet visitors. Past two sets of double doors is a translucent curtain through which a strange scene can be glimpsed as well as heard. On the other side of the veil, a smooth, white-painted elephant is bellowing its death throes next to a glass artificial heart. Watching over the dying pachyderm are three figurines whose positioning gives them a solemn, priestly air. High above, rows of blown glass orbs flicker with light as the soundscape shifts from delicate chimes to deeper, bodily groans. The snugness of the space amplifies both the sounds and the sense that we are witnessing something powerful at the threshold of life and death. In the next room, an intricate tree of honeycomb forms is surrounded by a selection of otherworldly organic forms made from wood and glass. Like a giant mushroom or the brain of an unknown intelligence, the honeycomb tree is the room’s nerve centre. Humeau is known for her rigorously researched exhibitions and for collaborating with a smorgasbord of experts from different fields of knowledge, whether palaeontologists, anthropologists, foragers or clairvoyants. Her beautifully produced work is an exploration of the kinds of intelligence – cellular, celestial and conscious – that might provide hope for our collective future.

Tanoa Sasraku’s exhibition, Morale Patch, unfolds over one large gallery. On one wall is a giant, framed piece of paper that’s been cut with a suit pattern; the paper, we are informed, is saturated with a reddish-brown raw pigment found in Ghana and in Cornwall. Holding the centre of the room is a gargantuan plinth laid with velvet-lined trays arranged chequerboard-style, and on which sits a selection of acetate paperweights containing mini samples of crude oil. On the walls around this table are works on paper whose forms reference the mounts of military ribbons, each one named for a war operation tied to oil – among them Desert Shield (aka the first phase of the Gulf War) and the post 9/11 war in Afghanistan dubbed, with painful irony, Enduring Freedom. Each is made up of bleached strips held in place at the edges of the frame by binder clips whose colours refer to those of specific military ribbons. The Plymouth-born, Glasgow-based artist takes the destructive mess of resource extraction back to its own nerve-centre, the C-suite: the paper pattern calls to mind the incipient Savile Row suit of a fat cat executive, the table a board game for the board room, with desperately real stakes.   

The quiet minimalism of Sasraku’s exhibition gives way to the resonant darkness of Simeon Barclay’s architectural installation, The Ruin, for which Barclay has turned a live spoken-word performance piece about his formative years growing up in a working class, Caribbean household in Huddersfield into an immersive environment. That spoken word performance provides the voice-over for a film that plays in a structure built from scaffolding. The scaffolding is a reference to the building of the M62 motorway, a huge post-war project that transformed the landscape of the Pennines, and was a lifeline linking young Barclay to the world beyond Huddersfield. Though dark and ostensibly industrial (Barclay also worked in manufacturing for 16 years), the screening room feels cosy, the screen functioning like a TV in a living room. Balloons hang down from the ceiling, their ribbons trailing, as the film unspools to the sounds of Barclay’s mellifluous meditation on the passage of time. In the footage, the M62 is pictured almost like a river, with cars flowing endlessly to the horizon. An especially lyrical section focuses on a photograph of Barclay’s childhood living room, decorated with its own photographs and mementoes, over which the artist travels deeper into his past and the ever-changing environment of his youth.   

A performance unfolds upstairs in London-born Kira Freije’s monumental showcase, Unspeak the Chorus, except this one is eerily quiet. Freije has populated an enormous room separated by a staircase from the rest of the presentations with sculptural figures built from strips of welded metal. The mirrored walls are studded with stage lights emitting a soft glow, while a fine mist percolates around the pieces. The figures are sculptural armatures but with solid, aluminium-cast feet, hands and vividly expressive faces. (Freije usually casts her figures’ hands and feet from her own, while the faces are based on those of people who are meaningful to her.) Alone, in pairs, or alongside little animals, her tableaux resemble actors in rehearsal and the entire room has the feel of a backstage area, hung with scraps of antique fabric and scattered with props. Floating on the mirrored walls are sculpted, disembodied limbs that appear ready to touch the reflected bodies of visitors to the room. It’s an enchanting, haunting space, peopled with rough-hewn, half-drawn forms that seem to ache for real, human touch.  

The Turner Prize 2026 exhibition is open at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art now