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The Tate Britain has announced the 2008 shortlist for the prestigious Turner Prize and once again seems to be courting controversy.

“Found objects” and video are the tools of the trade for the four artists picked for the 2008 award.

The nomination of Glaswegian Cathy Wilkes, 42, is sure to raise eyebrows. Representing Scotland at the 2005 Venice Biennale, she gathered together a television, a sink with a single human hair and a pram and titled it She’s Pregnant Again.

While one museum director, who insisted on anonymity, dismissed that work as a “disgrace”, the Tate described her “highly charged” arrangements of commonplace objects as “an articulate and eloquent vocabulary”.

The shortlist also includes Runa Islam, 37, a Bangladesh-born video artist who explores “notions of truth and fiction, subjectivity and authorship”. In First Day of Spring, she filmed a group of rickshaw drivers she had instructed to sit and do nothing.

The Tate praised her “closely choreographed films with open-ended narratives that are analytical and emotionally charged”.

Further competition for the £30,000-prize comes from the only man on the list, Mark Leckey, 43, another video artist from London, who focuses on youth sub-cultures with a soundtrack of music from his own band. The Tate praised “his wit and originality”.

Finally there is Goshka Macuga, 40, a Pole who is said to “blur the boundaries between artist, curator and collector” by laying out images of other artists’ work alongside apparently random objects such as books and souvenirs described by the Tate as “dramatic environments”.

The Turner Prize has become the world’s most provocative and prestigious contemporary art award but, for its critics, the 2008 selection would only confirm that Turner, the 19th-century master, would be turning in his grave.

Given annually to a British artist under 50 “for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work”, the prize is no stranger to controversy. Each year, it overlooks traditional artistry.

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