MARK LECKEY: "I become attached to something and it seems to convey or question an anomaly that I'm trying to resolve."

In one half of his room Leckey presents films, slides and exhibition posters - all separate works - while the other half is taken up with Cinema-in-the-Round 2006, a film of Leckey giving a lecture about history of art and the impact of images.

The critic's view
If you were brought up in the underground rave culture of the Eighties, as Mark Leckey was, you will understand instinctively how fluid the whole of reality can feel. As you move amid strobes that melt everything into an endlessly mutating musical beat you feel that nothing is fixed. This, perhaps, is the feeling that Leckey seeks to capture in his contemporary take on the William Burroughs cut-up. He sticks postmodernism on the turntable, spinning our culture like some mad DJ, mixing and melding information to evoke the feverish creativity of the cross-bred contemporary mind. Leckey asks us to consider what is real and what is not.

Visitors' views

I think that the thing with Leckey's room is it is presenting other people's work: it helps the viewer to understand the ideas that are behind contemporary art as it is now. In his lecture he starts with sculpture in its primitive state and works all the through to contemporary practice. I think he is offering a public service and he should be the winner of this year's Turner Prize. His work fulfils all the criteria.
Cornelius Brady, 47, North London

Leckey brings pop culture and cinematographic culture into the art world and explores the crossover between them. When I looked the show up online I was surprised to see that he is on MySpace: I didn't expect that, but it's good. He's bringing in areas of contemporary cultural interest that would have been outside the spectrum of interests of more traditional artists. Today's culture is media; cinema, advertising, MySpace and YouTube. Art always has the problem of being seen as an elitist activity. Maybe he's moving away from the elitist artists who are unable to relate to everyday media experiences.
Edward Gillibrand, 22, Winchester

The basis for the installation seemed to be his love of these cartoon characters. For me it was also about images, about ways of creating a moving image. That was my interest, even if it was not intended. It seemed an unusual means of exploring the moving image, which you would normally expect to be done in a more factual way.
Graham Asker

RUNA ISLAM: "Do you look at a film? Do you read it? Do you illustrate with a camera, or do you write with a camera?"

Islam is exhibiting three film works. The first, Be the First to See What You See as You See It, shows a woman examining teapots, cups, saucers and porcelain bells placed on plinths. Eventually she flicks the lid of one teapot, and then pushes it to the ground where it smashes. The second film, First Day of Spring 2005, shows five rickshaw drivers who seem to be waiting for fares. CINEMATOGRAPHY 2007 uses the camera to spell out the letters of the title of the film.

The critic's view
Runa Islam is an obsessive, inward-looking artist who specialises in making films and video installations that explore and probe their own materials and possibilities scrupulously. When is something subjective and when are we being manipulated by an authorial voice? Islam painstakingly shows us the ways in which the camera achieves its effects, letting her lens slowly explore a building, for instance, in CINEMATOGRAPHY, revealing how disparate fragments can be assembled into a complete picture. She blurs the boundaries between film and sculpture.

Visitors' views
It is a very aesthetic approach to video. Focusing on the teacups film, it was a slow process of teasing. It was very satisfying that the cups are full when they are broken. I think it left me with more of a feeling than an impression: it felt good, somehow, and I wanted to watch all of it.
Philippe Schlesser, 31, Luxembourg

BS: The first film was very clever. You are looking at these beautiful objects, yet the woman doesn't seem to be appreciating them.
SG: She seems to be in a bit of a dream.
BS: The objects seemed so delicate, sitting on plinths, but she starts using them: the suspense built up with everything that she broke. By the end it was really powerful.
SG: [on CINEMATOGRAPHY 2007] With every film you are only ever watching what they want to show you - and in this film that was made very obvious.
BS: In the other film it was fascinating to watch these rickshaw men slouching around - you felt you had a real insight into their lives. They weren't doing anything much, but the way she focused on each one individually was very interesting. Of the four artists, she was the most aesthetically pleasing.
Bronwyn Sheedy and Steve Game, Melbourne

Initially I thought the first film was banal, but it had a stillness that was really unusual. The second film was too fast, but the third combined a photographic quality with movement. The contrast of held stillness with speed was fascinating. it made me look at things differently.
Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer

I loved the film where the girl breaks the dishes. She was beautiful, and she just gently touched them. Why did she do it? It's not clear. But most of us have wanted to do that at some point.
Joanne Pearson

GOSHKA MAVCUGA: "My work is not trying to make a statement. It's a playful way of offering possibilities for a new reading. "

Macuga's Turner Prize room contains three sculptural installations that reinterpret the work of Mies van der Rohe's partner Lilly Reich, who pioneered new ways of designing exhibitions in the 1930s. The room also contains a series of “assemblages” - collages of works from the original archives of the artist couple Paul Nash and Eileen Agar.

The critic's view
Goshka Macuga creates a sculptural environment which, if it feels a bit like the lobby of some corporate building, is probably because that's pretty much what it is. Macuga is known for quoting and often incorporating the work of other artists in her pieces. In this show she is looking at the work of Lilly Reich, a designer who, though a skilled pioneer, was subsequently overshadowed by her collaborator, Mies van der Rohe, who left Berlin to find success in the US. Reich's glass plate and tubular steel constructions, intended for an exhibition space in Germany, are now uselessly stranded. They capture a sense of fragile emptiness, and through them we see an alternative version of history.

Visitors' views
If I were a bathroom designer I'd consider the central sculpture a great shower concept. The rest I didn't understand: I don't know why they call it art. It seems to have rails around the edge for handicapped people. It's mad.
Enrica Rocca

The sculpture in the middle was intriguing - I liked it and wanted to know more about it. But I didn't understand it. The rails around the side seemed irrelevant. And the paintings? I giggled when I saw them. It looked like she'd had help from her eight-year-old niece.
Simon Penman

I appreciated the central piece, Deutches Volk - Deutsche Arbeit. It's a work that you can walk around, and as you do you see different aspects: it reveals itself as you walk around it.
Maureen Measure, Leytonstone, East London

I was so confused by her explanation of what she was trying to do. She seemed inclined to over-intellectualise - presumably we were meant to think it was all terribly clever, but I just thought ‘I don't understand'.
James Scobie

I've just come from seeing Francis Bacon and that is still in my mind, but I enjoyed the whole of this room. It was decorated with a rain design, and she used grey and monotone to encourage memory. You could see reflections through the sculptures, and for me it was easy to understand and I enjoyed it. But as for the other rooms, we just escaped!
Sunkyung Jung

CATHY WILKES: "This is to do with the separation between people and the impossibility of feeling what someone else feels."

Wilkes's installation, entitled Give You All My Money 2008, consists of two supermarket checkout units on which are scattered unwashed bowls and cups, and around which are placed mannequins (one sitting on a lavatory, the other with a cage on its head) and objects including an oven, a ladder, some tiles and some charred sticks.

The critic's view
Cathy Wilkes's installation, a jumble of fairly unremarkable objects left in the middle of a gallery, comes together to create what feels like a disconcerting theatrical set. The artist leaves the interpretation up to you. Who are the naked mannequins at the checkout? Was it them who ate all the bowls of food and licked out the jar of Bon Maman jam?

Wilkes plays with surrealistic juxtapositions to create a sprawling web of enigma that grows more confusing and complicated the longer you look.

Visitors' views
You know that energy when you get really excited? Nothing here gave me that at all. I didn’t understand the installation. They never do it for me. And this idea has been used so much; empty tins and things scattered on the floor — there is nothing new there. Probably the artist was saying something, I have to give her that — but for me, no. Unfortunately, no.
Anula Arawwawela, London

I feel like she was making a social statement but I don’t think she was saying it with much craft. I gather that it is a feminist look at things; these caged women are doing women’s work in the supermarket, with evidence of their shortcomings all around them — that’s what I took from it. But for me there was no overwhelming artistic quality to itother than the statement it makes.
Erin Adams, 29, Vancouver, Canada

This was really good. The mannequin sitting on the toilet — you could have read that as so many things: the question is, what do you, personally, read it as? To me it felt like capitalism — selling. There was a Sony battery in a vitrine on the stove, and I think that I think referred to the global markets. It was fun to read that.
Shahin Toosi, 25, London

I thought it was a bit trite. It seemed not to be exploring as much about identity as it could have done – much of the installation seemed to be saying the same thing in a similar way.
Sarah Kendall

This was particularly poor. I didn’t see any artistic merit. I know it is an installation of found objects, but they weren’t arranged in any interesting way. It didn’t even appear especially voyeuristic or personal to the artist — as, say, an unmade bed is. It was just mannequins and jars.
Patrick Ward

Why did she collect so many ugly little things? Her house must be depressing with all that junk hanging around. But I liked it.
Peter Smith

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