CULTURE TURNER PRIZE 2015
Exit stage left: Sarah Munro may be departing the
Tramway but she leaves it in good shape with the Turner Prize on December 7, 2015
A study in minimalism: How the Turner Prize came to Glasgow
BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN W
e meet upstairs at Glasgow’s Tramway, on Sarah Munro’s last day as direc- tor of the gallery.
She’s not even halfway through the exhibition for the most prestigious arts prize in the land, the Turner, but she’s landed a job at the Baltic con- temporary arts centre in Gateshead and has been busy sorting through dusty filing cabinets to gather up
8 | EVENTSBASE | WINTER 2015
eight years worth of work. It’s an opportunity she can’t turn down, she says, so seldom do such auspicious opportunities arise. And anyway, the exhibition is now firmly established in the converted tram depot, so she’s “surplus to requirements” anyway. We sit down to talk about how the
Tramway came to host this lumi- nous and sometimes derided annual ceremony, which down the years has thrust into the limelight the likes of Tracey Emin, Grayson Perry and Antony Gormley. I’m curious as
to how the process works, from an events perspective, owing to what seems like an increasingly competi- tive market for big ticket items; after all the Turner has only departed London on three occasions in 31 years, with the Tramway now the fourth. It must cost a fortune, surely, and the bidding process an endless round of form-filling, presentations and generating enough of a ‘wow’ factor to impress the eminences of the Tate. To my surprise, perhaps because
she is demob happy, Munro confesses that the prize was secured on the ba- sis of a three-page entry, and around £200 spent on sundries including taxi fares for the judges, a “nice breakfast” and “bunch of flowers” for the downstairs desk. So that was how the Tramway
secured the Turner, beating off stiff competition in 2013 from Notting- ham Contemporary, New Art Gallery in Walsall and Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester? In an age of auster- ity perhaps it’s a fitting antidote to the millions lavished on much larger sporting spectacles. But cost is not the defining story.
Munro thinks there were actually three significant factors which se- cured the exhibition for the Tram- way. While ‘partnership working’ seems to be one of those overused phrases, in this case Munro believes the close cooperation between Tram- way and its collaborators – Glasgow City Marketing Bureau, Glasgow Life, Event Scotland and Creative Scotland – helped to present a united front. “It was the city working collective- ly and seeing something as a signifi-
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