Artists have their say

For his first show as ICA exhibitions director, Jens Hoffmann has invited artists to choose their favourite works. Here is a review of the best...

NAN GOLDIN
Her choice: Candy Darling On Her Deathbed, 1974, by Peter Hujar
Goldin's photographs, presented in a major show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2002, graphically reveal her friendships, betrayals and losses. Her most famous series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1978-88), depicts the hedonistic excesses of her and her friends in New York, including drag queens, drug addicts and ex-lovers:

"As a teenager, the films of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey were formative experiences for me. I saw their film Women in Revolt, starring Candy Darling, many times. Candy died from cancer due to her reaction to female hormone treatment. Even in the early 1970s she had the courage to live out her true self. Queens, transsexuals and gay men were the entire context of my own adolescence and we all worshipped Candy Darling. When I discovered this photograph I was deeply moved. I know that she was very ill when it was taken, yet she dressed in full drag for the photoshoot as a demonstration of her strong spirit."

MARIKO MORI
Her choice: Spiral Jetty, 1970, film by Robert Smithson
Mori makes self-portraits in different guises: from a cutesy Japanese manga girl to a traditional Zenlike Buddhist statue. She lives and works between Tokyo and New York but studied at Chelsea School of Art and exhibited her cosmic, canopied Dream Temple in the Royal Academy's 2000 Apocalypse show, where visitors were invited to kick off their shoes, enter the structure one-by-one and meditate:

"A dynamic installation, staged at the best possible location, within a vast nature, the Spiral Jetty transcends time and space. A door to the sacred world of another dimension. It makes me feel the Earth's life force and the power of regeneration. I was awakened by something wild, something passionate that rose from deep inside. The Spiral Jetty continues to breath today in our mind."

YINKA SHONIBARE
His choice: Giraffe, 1998, by Laura Ford
Shonibare is on the short list of this year's Turner Prize for his amusing and disturbing sculptures that bring together traditional African textiles and science fiction. Brought up in Lagos and London, his life-size aliens and headless Victorians explore the relationship between his ethnic identity and Britain's colonial past:

"Laura Ford is known for her depictions of childhood, such as girls who are sweet, innocent and terroristlike. She paints little boys dressed as pensioners and surreal depictions of animals. Giraffe is a portrait of a mutual friend, photographer Hugo Glendinning, one of the few people I know who is taller than me. I like Giraffe because he looks clumsy, and because he has a bad back and so did Hugo."

MAURIZIO CATTELAN
His choice: The Lights Going On And Off, 2000, installation by Martin Creed
Cattelan is the art world's biggest joker, and yet one of the most successful international artists of the moment. For a recent Serpentine show he stuck posters around London printed with Arabic love poetry, but his waxwork of Pope John Paul felled by a meteorite also at the RA's Apocalypse show is more typical of his iconoclastic antics:

"We all have our bad days, and we all have our good days. You wake up and the sun is shining. And then, out of the blue, there you go again, down the dark pit of depression. Art is no different. Sometimes I feel so happy, sometimes I feel so sad. I always thought The Lights Going On and Off has something to do with this simple truth. I do not know what Creed was thinking about when he made it but to me it always looked like a mood swing. That's why I never found it funny but frightening in its simplicity, it's a sculpture for our Prozac enhanced reality. Are we afraid of the dark or blinded by the light?"

PAUL McCARTHY
His choice: Disney's model of the Matterhorn, 1958
Californian McCarthy, whose enormous cartoon blow-ups Blockhead and Daddies Big Head towered in front of Tate Modern last year, has been one of the most influential performance artists since the 1960s. His irreverent live events often involve chocolate or tomato ketchup; recently he staged a fight between actors playing the Queen, Osama bin Laden and George W Bush at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Piccadilly: