Wallinger wins Turner with reconstruction of war protest

Published on Tuesday 4 December 2007 00:56

A RECONSTRUCTION of a one-man anti-war protest won the Turner Prize last night.

Mark Wallinger, whose other work has included roaming around a gallery late at night dressed as a bear, scooped the 25,000 contemporary art prize for his painstaking replica of Brian Haw's encampment. At Tate Britain, he staged a reconstruction of 600 weather-beaten banners, flags and placards.

Essex-born Wallinger had been hot favourite for the Turner Prize, which was also contested by the Glasgow artist Nathan Coley, for his candy cane-striped models of religious buildings, Zarina Bhimji's photographs of her homeland Uganda and a wood-and-chicken-wire construction by Mike Nelson. For the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Wallinger submitted a film, Sleeper, in which he dressed in a bear suit and wandered around a Berlin gallery over ten nights. He said the title referred to Cold War spies and that he was inspired by a film about a prince turned into a bear he saw as a child.

The prize jury praised his winning entry, State Britain, for its "immediacy, visceral intensity and historic importance". Wallinger said: "Brian Haw is a most remarkable man who has waged a tireless campaign against the folly and hubris of our government's foreign policy. Bring home the troops, give us back our rights, trust the people."