Kira Freije’s cyborg installation leads a fiercely competitive Turner prize show
The Turner prize exhibition at Middlesbrough’s Mima is presented as a highly competitive show, with critic Adrian Searle strongly favouring Kira Freije’s installation. Her 33 life-sized steampunk cyborgs, set in a misty apocalyptic landscape, explore humanity’s survival through empathy, tenderness and compassion, making the work feel both emotionally powerful and urgently contemporary.
Simeon Barclay’s immersive installation is praised as visceral and haunting, though its themes and narrative links are considered insufficiently focused. Marguerite Humeau’s elaborate sculptures and unsettling soundscape are admired for their strangeness but criticised as conceptually thin, while Tanoa Sasraku’s contribution is only briefly introduced in the supplied extract.
- Kira Freije’s cyborg installation dominates the Turner prize exhibition.
- Its central message is that compassion survives technological dehumanisation.
- Other shortlisted works are engaging but less cohesive or substantial.
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Originally published by The Guardian as “Turner prize review – soulful cyborgs go into battle with a stack of massive Hobnobs”.