Turner Prize 2018, Tate Britain, London: 26 September 2018-6 January 2019

So here we are in 2018, in the top room of the Tate Britain. It’s split into four murky caves (screening rooms): every finalist for this year’s prize is a filmmaker, in one form or another, and their works are on loop throughout the day. First up is Charlotte Prodger, with her monologues on gender identities set against shots of Neolithic Scotland. Then there’s Luke Willis Thompson, who draws out art from the tragic killings of black people by police. Forensic Architecture, the only organisational finalist, has made a drama with raw footage of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police. Naeem Mohaiemen, reflecting on 21st-century North Africa, gives us stony footage of crowds, and worn-faced victims of conflict.

So clearly the Turner 2018 is political. Other reviewers have described this overt politicism as ramming ideas down your throat, posturing, and hiding behind fashionable opinions instead of opening up intelligent debate. However, the works tackle such different topics that it’s hard to see how they could be reduced to some chorus of right-on talking points. Each artist here needs good time devoted to them, to bring out the differences in what they do.

That said, the works aren’t very visitor-friendly. The films are far too long. You’re looking at about 2½ hours to cover everything. Even if you do stick around that long, you’ll inevitably be too worn out mentally to appreciate the last as much as the first. Luckily, most of the films feel like montages with an overarching message, so you can walk in and out and still get a good sense of what’s going on.

Attacked as “self-indulgent”, Prodger’s work actually has a clever premise. The very topical debates on gender identity are set against an ancient landscape, rather than a rootless, brooding city or a swirling “mental place”. The narrator’s exploration of her lesbianism versus her masculine appearance is built around the “grid” of spacetime, the “rhythm” of reality. When we walked in, the first clip we saw was of swans grooming themselves on a Scottish marsh, followed by a Neolithic monument in windy grass. A Scottish-sounding voiceover on these clips tells anecdotes of an masculine-looking lesbian who is misidentified, over and over, in her society. An old woman is taken aback by this “man” in a ladies’ toilet. A shop worker assumes he’s looking at a customer’s dad, not her girlfriend. Perhaps this misrecognised woman is Prodger, perhaps not; the point might be that a biographical self is set up here between the two

Our Gaelic monologue goes quiet as electronic-like folk music blares out, ushering in a rocking shot of a nighttime city at the foot of a mountain. Dream-Fuji-Land cuts to a cat asleep on a bed. The idea of rocking is carried through into a shot of a ship’s stern, as it bobs on a foaming northern sea. The sheer repetitiveness of swans’ swooping necks, of a moving ship, and of a static bedroom, seem to point to that relentless drum of spacetime which Prodger loves. “It’s here now”, says the voice, “it was here when I was writing this, and when I edited it”.

The theme of identity carries you from Prodger through to Willis Thompson. A text on the door of this second installation explains the inspiration for Thompson’s films: the police shooting of a black woman in Brixton, and the live-streamed shooting of a black man in Minnesota. As well as rock-faced portraits of the victims’ loved ones is a looped shot of a black girl, downcast and mouthing something, as if grieving to the point of losing herself. Who is she? The focus here seems to be on her racial identity; her sadness is the sadness of all those black Britons and Americans who have lost their loved ones to police violence. The really memorable part of this installation, though, is _Human. Donald Rodney, dying in hospital of sickle-cell anaemia, a common condition in black people, has made a model of a house out of his own skin. Thompson’s camera pans over this model close up. The light passing through the sheets of skin, criss-crossed with strange patterns, is wonderfully disgusting. Out of all the entries, _Human comes closest to “art” the way it’s traditionally understood: something crafted by hand, striking enough to break free of the context in which it was made, and provoking strong reactions no matter how many times you think about it. It also takes to a literal extreme Thompson’s interest in “violence against real bodies” over “media spectacle”. The effect is slightly dampened though by the shots lingering for so long. You get why a skin model of a house is disgusting, its back story so tragic, without having to see it from so many angles. We went back into the room several times to see if the film had changed to those portraits of the two black men. It hadn’t, so we never saw them in the end (we only know about them from Google).

Things got very interesting in the Forensic Architecture room. Forensic Architecture describe themselves as a research agency, who encourage people to film crimes around the world so the researchers can to map them digitally, and eventually put together evidence which can be used in international courts. Their installation at the Turner centred on footage of Israeli police clearing a Palestinian village, to make way for a Jewish settlement. The footage, filmed at night, is hard-hitting: you see police screaming at those trying to resist; gunfire breaks out, and a car horn blares in the background. The raw camera work is interspersed with digital mappings of the scene, the two sometimes interweaving. The Long Duration of a Split Second definitely challenges the boundary between art and life, but you wonder if an art competition is the right place for it. Nothing has been consciously created here, it’s been recorded, and doesn’t really try to break out of its original frame of international justice. Critics might have slammed the more “right-on” angle of Prodger and Thompson, but it was Forensic Architecture that most left us feeling the politics had overstepped its mark at this competition.

This review might have left Naeem Mohaimen until last, but you definitely shouldn’t. Tripoli Cancelled is as long as a feature film, and you’ve got Two Meetings and a Funeral on top. The stomach-punch of Forensic Architecture might revive a burnt out visitor, but Mohaimen’s films need your sustained concentration. A great opening sequence has a man shaving into the camera, his overlaid monologue alternating with the scratches of his razor. Like Tom Hanks, our main character is holed up in an airport, but he seems to be North African, and the airport seems to be in Greece. It’s a nod to the conflicts in that part of the world, but an unclear one. He eats beans from a tin and reads Watership Down in a departure hall. He has a family, but where they are, and if they’re alive, is a mystery. The camerawork however is fantastic, and despite his cryptic behaviour we somehow feel like we’re getting to know him, and understand his struggle, even if we’re not exactly sure what it is. Like Long Duration, Two Meetings and a Funeral feels like straightforward politics, centering on a discussion of the Non-Aligned Movement and the place of Algeria between Europe and North Africa. Why had young Algerians turned their backs on the Pan-African movement? There was more than one “where is this going?” moment when we saw this. As for Volume Eleven: this was a concertina book telling the story of the Bengali author Syed Mujtaba Ali. These were on a shelf for you to take and read at your leisure. Except when we got there they’d all gone. Oops.

This exhibition is worth a go. Don’t go with expectations, good or bad, and you’ll probably get the most out of it. Film fans will love this year’s focus on cinema. In any case, keep your eyes on the Turnip Prize, a satirised version of the Turner attracting deliberately terrible art. Winners are announced on 4 December.

Jonny Elling