‘Each shot feels like a private performance’: Rene Matić, the Turner shortlist’s only photographer

Rene Matić’s nomination for the 2025 Turner prize was announced the week this accumulation opened. Only 1 lensman has ever been awarded the prize – Wolfgang Tillmans. Matić is not a technically masterly photographer, but a quiescent perceiver of things, similar Tillmans. Matić riffs connected a documentary, diaristic benignant of photography, with snapshots of mundane moments and poetic juxtapositions, which are past utilized to make installations, grouping images to surreptitiously bring retired buried tensions and paradoxes. Where those tensions person often been urgent and aggravated successful Matić’s erstwhile exhibitions, this caller amusement highlights different facet of their work. It is possibly Matić’s astir idiosyncratic exploration yet.

Although these installations are evocative slices of life, it’s the whiteness of the gallery’s walls and ceiling that you announcement first. Their sharp, stark achromatic engulfs the contrasting small-scale obsidian pictures, scattered crossed the partition similar acheronian gems connected a pristine beach. The whiteness is overbearing and cold, but it besides emphasises the lustrous prime of the black-and-white pictures. This plays symbolically into Matić’s interest with the rubric of whiteness successful British society, and however blackness lives within, alongside oregon extracurricular it. Their images picture what galore of america mixed-race radical successful the UK acquisition arsenic being in-between, thing Matić has termed “rude(ness)”. The elemental choice, to marque the pictures tiny and spot them sparsely connected the achromatic wall, makes you acquisition this “rude(ness)” conception visually.

Close capable to scope retired … Touching Campbell’s Face, 2025. Photograph: Tom Carter/ courtesy of the creator and Arcadia Missa, London

Blackness and whiteness are important to Matić’s identity. They are besides important successful making a photograph. These images are the effect of Matić’s archetypal forays into the darkroom, processing metallic gelatin prints. The attraction this progressive was fitting for the pictures, which are each idiosyncratic – showing the artist’s interior circle. They represent a travel inwards and towards those closest, to the radical and things that marque a idiosyncratic who they are. As the rubric suggests, determination are intimate images of household members, friends, partners, self-portraits. It is each explored with the feeling of being adjacent capable to scope retired to 1 another: successful one, Touching Campbell’s Face, Matić does conscionable that. The portraits, peculiarly the 1 of a heavy large friend, are astir however bodies of loved ones tin beryllium full worlds.

There are besides shadows, hinting astatine the absent, chartless parts of ourselves, made disposable by the light. There are taste objects that person shaped Matić’s knowing of their ain identity: a vintage first-edition transcript of James Baldwin’s Another Country reclining successful a luxurious heap of rumpled bedsheets and pillows; a Nina Simone vinyl record; a lineup of Matić’s postulation of figurines by St Martin de Porres, the 16th-century Peruvian laic member canonised arsenic the patron saint of mixed-race radical and each those seeking radical harmony.

Half-revealed … Rene’s Legs, 2025. Photograph: Tom Carter/courtesy of the creator and Arcadia Missa, London

By ceremonial standards, the photographs are mostly good. What makes them absorbing is the mode Matić arranges them, sometimes placed coming towards each other, sometimes heightening the tensions of difference, moving against each other. Some of the sequences are looser. Four images broadside by broadside represent a person and predominant muse, the playwright Travis Alabanza, wrapped successful a achromatic towel; and different person Grace, backstage earlier a show astatine Ugly Duck, a LGBTQIA+ arts organisation successful London. The Simone record. We spot different friend, Mia, astatine the room table, a motion to Carrie Mae Weems. Mia is surrounded by bare bottles – the aerial seems heavy with the intimacy of a late-night moment.

Each feels similar a backstage show for Matić’s camera. In different image, different benignant of implied performance, Matić’s blond wig and achromatic level shoes are formed off, abandoned connected the floor. The sensation is of Matić shrugging disconnected the mask, feeling safe.

Matić’s assemblage passim remains lone half-revealed, though: smoky, brushed images of their legs, their shadows. In 1 image, we spot the photographer’s reflection successful a mirror, holding the camera, an apparition supra a clutch of cherished household pictures astatine their granny’s house. A reconciliation of sorts comes successful paired parent and begetter portraits, some shown holding cigarettes. At this point, you realise what other this amusement is telling you: it each begins with love.