This year’s Turner Prize nominees include Barbara Walker who is nominated for a series of works exploring the fallout from the Windrush scandal in the UK. The other nominees are Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung and Rory Pilgrim. An exhibition of the nominees’ works will take place at the Towner Gallery, East Sussex (28 September-14 April); the winner, who receives £25,000, will be announced on December 5.

Walker was selected for her Burden of proof installation – composed of large charcoal portraits drawn on the wall and eight works on paper – presented at the Sharjah Biennale 15 (until June 11). The works incorporate hand-drawn facsimiles of original documents, such as an invoice for legal services and a temporary certificate of discharge from the army.

Walker says in an online statement that the drawings take into account “the wide scope of the Windrush scandal through portraits of people affected by the actions of a hostile state. [The work] focuses on the evidence that helped prove the legitimacy of those the UK government had mislabeled as ‘undocumented migrants’. Melanie Keen, member of the jury and director of the Wellcome Collection in London, at a press briefing today: “Walker has captured the essence of who these people are in a way that is impossible to ‘ignore.”

Vulnerability as a theme also permeates the work of Bristol-born Rory Pilgrim, who is nominated for the commission RAFTS at the Serpentine Galleries and Barking Town Hall, as well as a live performance of the work at Cadogan Hall in London; the resulting film features eight residents of Barking and Dagenham.

The work was commissioned for the Radio ballads series at the Serpentine last year. “Made during the Covid-19 pandemic, Pilgrim positions the raft as a symbol of support that keeps us afloat in difficult and precarious circumstances,” an exhibit statement read. “We were struck by the skill of the cinema and the beautiful musical arrangements,” said Helen Nisbet, jury member, artistic director of the Art Night festival (and new general manager and artistic director of Cromwell Place).

Stockholm-born Leung brings her personal touch to baby monitors, child safety gates and inflatables. Her Monitors the 2022 works consisted of a baby monitor installed in one room which broadcast into another; his exhibition at Simian in Copenhagen earned him the nomination. “The jury praised…his commitment to questioning the way art is produced and disseminated,” the exhibition statement adds.

Jesse Darling is nominated for his solo exhibition No medals, no ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at the Camden Art Center (Martin Clark, director of the Camden Art Centre, is also on the jury). The vulnerability, the precariousness and the fragility of the universe are again underlying the works. “Moving through these spaces [in Oxford], people encountered sculptures that were often fragile and precarious,” Keen said. The Oxford show included full-size roller coasters bent into the skeletal shape of a woolly mammoth alongside deformed mobility aids.