Toasting Beck's Future

I always look forward to Beck's Futures at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It is the art prize that rewards neither complacency nor history: this is art in the present tense, art that I'm not sure what to do with. One day - not yet - we will be able to speak of it without comparison to the Turner.

In truth, the prizes really are nothing alike. The Turner rewards what the art world has already embraced. Beck's Futures tells the art world to brace itself for something it has not yet seen.

My contemporary art world was defined both at Millbank and the Mall, but, over the past 20 years, it was the ICA, anomalous among the yesministries of St James's, that reeked of hip and intellectual street-cred. But of late art has worked itself about town - there are more places to see new work than ever before, bringing the ICA, at times, close to redundancy.

Its director, Phillip Dodd, admits that the venue "has taken time to reorchestrate itself ". His strategy has been to develop global links, making the ICA a hub of techno-connectivity, from Beijing to Delhi. No longer simply an exhibition or performance venue but, as the novelist JG Ballard called it recently, "a post-2000 ideas lab".

Dodd defends his left-field position, suggesting that it is time to look elsewhere for new developments in art. "London's problem has been narcissism. The party has been so good here." If Tate Britain's current In-AGadda-Da-Vida exhibition is a nostalgic celebration of where the Nineties scene began, it also draws a wobbly line under it and signals a younger generation to move on.

"The YBAs were really YLAs, London artists," Dodd says. Beck's has had an extraordinary track record for highlighting new artists outside the capital, most notably producing three winners from Glasgow.

This year, the shortlist of 10 artists, aged from 29 to 43, whose work goes on show from Friday, may all be UKbased, but their influences are resolutely international. Haluk Akakce came from Turkey to study in London; Tonico Lemos Auad from Brazil; Ergin Cavusoglu from Bulgaria. Susan Philipsz bucked the trend and left her native Glasgow to study in Belfast, while Imogen Stidworthy left London for Liverpool, via Maastricht.

Dodd attributes the eclectic, itinerant shortlist to a panel of judges that has always included artists; this year, American Mark Dion and Frenchman Philippe Parreno. (The Turner has never included an artist on its judging panel.)

The list of contenders this year, somewhat more robust than last, covers a range of media, from Andrew Cross's rigorous films of train tracks to Simon Bedwell's irreverent distortions of popular posters.

One of my favourites for the prize is Susan Philipsz, who works with her own voice to make sound sculptures. She brings, for example, new resonance to a traditional Irish folk song, The Lass of Aughrim, cited in Joyce's The Dead, by setting it to blank film (screened in the ICA cinema) - it almost feels as if it's your own voice in your head.