Engaged with society and gripping: Laure Prouvost scoops the 2013 Turner Prize

You’re in a darkened room, watching a grainy video of a messy, surreal tea party, as a French-sounding slightly crazy woman recounts the story of her imaginary grandad, who has disappeared down a trap door into a tunnel strewn by crisp packets.

In an adjoining space, grandmother’s dream is recounted: “Grandmother dreams that airliners become half teapot and pour tea all over the world”.

This is Laure Prouvost’s “Wantee” which has won the Turner Prize.

I have to admit my “pretentious radar” was fully illuminated going into this exhibition. But it has been well and truly jammed by the work itself.

I tipped Prouvost’s work to win on Channel 4 News because it captivated me – and that is not easy.

There is layer upon layer of meaning in it – and not the meaning you are required to bring yourself, as in some of the less self-explained contemporary work.

The filthy abandoned apartment, with its trap door, its layers of dirt, its ridiculously clunky pastiche teapots – think Soviet constructivist porcelain done by an amateur in earthenware – tell us a story about now.

About our fears and manias about death and old age; but also a story about art – as Prouvost reveals Grandad’s supposed masterpieces have been used as trays, trowels etc.

It is surreal, scary and totally gripping as you sit there among the filth and pottery.

If there is now a tabloid rage-howl, as there usually is after the Turner Prize, I will not be joining it.

I think contemporary art has been guilty of detachment, of white-walled pretentiousness – and some of its big names have become carpetbaggers for the asset-hungry rich.

But each of the four works tonight is socially engaged – above all Tino Sehgal’s conversation piece – This is Exchange – which forces you to have a conversation about the market.

The people doing the conversations tell me – we are not allowed to film it – that “about 80 per cent of the people who come in are anti-capitalist”.

The conversation I was directed towards would not have put this work top of the list for inclusion on the curriculum of one of Michael Gove’s free schools.

There’s been much made of the setting: how Derry/Londonderry – even its name still politically sensitive – is reinventing itself through culture.

The exhibition is being staged in the abandoned barracks from which British paratroopers emerged to shoot 14 people dead on Bloody Sunday 1972.

The official Northern Ireland narrative is that this is part of the healing process. Local people insist the city is transformed by having so much art staged here during its year as city of culture. But they worry about whether this can be sustained, given funding issues.

At a more plebeian level I found my taxi driver – who’d been taken down a dark street in the 1980s to be executed by paramilitaries, but escaped – did not feel very healed.

Though prepared to be open minded about contemporary art, and its value to society, he was not very open minded about the motives of the politicians who have staged this event.

So that’s it: the Turner Prize. Prouvost won. We have no way of knowing whether her work is great art. But it is engaged with society, gripping in its narrative and a sensual feast. Which you can’t always say about the Turner.

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