Jesse Darling’s exuberant meditation on Britain’s borders is the right winner of this year’s Turner Prize

Jesse Darling has won this year’s £25,000 Turner Prize with an exhilarating sculptural installation on the subject of borders, in what promises to be a popular decision on the part of the judges. The 41-year-old, Berlin-based artist was not only the critics’ favourite, pretty much across the board, but was to my mind the only serious contender in an odd shortlist.

Yet Turner Prize juries have shown themselves determined to do the unexpected thing in recent years – from allowing the four shortlistees to share the prize in 2019 to choosing the dullest of four pretty dire art collectives in 2021. So I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d chosen another of this year’s shortlisted artists out of sheer, well, perversity.

Veteran Black British artist Barbara Walker’s drawn-on-the-wall tribute to the Windrush Generation would certainly have been a popular choice. Exhibiting the documents that her elderly subjects were asked to provide to the authorities during the horrific Windrush scandal provides a powerful context for her dignified, wall-filling charcoal portraits. Yet the portraits themselves feel too conventional and illustrative, and too obviously done from photographs, to truly move as works of art.

The inclusion of artist-composer Rory Pilgrim’s tuneful pop oratorio RAFTS, created in collaboration with young people in Barking and Dagenham, feels like a throwback to the dread days of the pandemic, when we were all encouraged to pull together for a more caring, sharing, humanly inclusive future. And goodness me, why not? Yet, activism-based art has to be innovative – or at least compellingly interesting in form – to justify its inclusion in a competition such as this. While it’s clear that Pilgrim’s young collaborators got an enormous amount out of the experience, the work itself, seen on video in Eastbourne, didn’t seem groundbreaking to me, as either art or music.

Employing the entire ventilation system of a Belgian bar and an array of her children’s toys, Ghislaine Leung’s post-conceptual installation feels retro in a very different way, harking back to a pre-YBA world of minutely minimal formal gestures. The Stockholm-born, London-based artist assembles objects and materials, then provides galleries with sets of instructions – “scores”, she calls them – with which to create her exhibitions. If this sounds novel, the idea of score-based art has been around at least since the Fifties, and the work didn’t offer much beyond a knowing and slightly second cool that was manifestly failing to ignite the Eastbourne crowds on the day of my visit.

Which left it to Jesse Darling’s exultantly lumpen, raggle-taggle meditation on Britain’s borders to inject some physical vitality into the proceedings. Whether his work is referring to national boundaries – and Eastbourne is, of course, bang on Britain’s southern edge – or hoardings around a local building site, Darling’s anarchic play with bent ladders and long-legged crash barriers that seem to dance around the room has a wild, kinetic energy that makes the other contenders’ work feel staid. Concrete-filled box files refer perhaps to immigration bureaucracy, while festooning flags that are not quite Union Jacks, but also very much that, remind us we’re in Brexit Britain.

Whether or not Darling is offering anything properly new – I was reminded at moments of Michael Dean and Helen Marten’s installations in the 2016 Turner show – there’s a sense of infectious excitement and raw enthusiasm in the unfettered manipulation of physical stuff. It’s a quality that’s essential to the creation of any worthwhile, never mind great, art. And one we’re not seeing enough of these days. The 2023 Turner Prize panel has, this time at least, made the right decision.