Turner prize 2013 shortlist takes a mischievous turn

A streak of subversive humour runs through the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Tino Sehgal, Laure Prouvost and David Shrigley – all nominated for this year's £40,000 art prize.

A figurative painter, a deviser of performance, a film-maker and a popular maker of darkly comic drawings have been nominated for the 2013 Turner prize, it has been announced.

The artists are Lynette Yiadom-Boakye for her paintings; Tino Sehgal, for his performance work in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London last summer; Laure Prouvost for her witty, absurd films-cum-installations and David Shrigley, whose Hayward Gallery exhibition last year introduced fans of his piquant, cartoonish drawings and animations to his work as a sculptor.

It is a list with an international flavour – Sehgal is Anglo-German, Prouvost is French but based in London – and with an unusually witty tang. Shrigley's humorous conjunctions of words and pictures had visitors to the Hayward laughing aloud last year; Prouvost's mischievous myth-making about her own invented family background is often very funny.

Yiadom-Boakye is nominated for her exhibition of paintings at the Chisenhale gallery: apparently traditional portraits, they are in fact drawn entirely from her own imagination and operate as constructed, painterly fictions. All her subjects are black, which she has called a "political gesture … We're used to looking at portraits of white people in painting."

Sehgal is nominated for a work at last year's Documenta exhibition in Germany, and his piece at Tate Modern called These Associations. In it, a team of participants, trained by Sehgal, performed curious choreographic routines and spoke to individual gallery-goers, telling them intimate, autobiographical stories. Sehgal has said that the material he works with is "people's attention".

The Turner prize exhibition this year will be in Derry-Londonderry as part of the UK City of Culture celebrations, from 23 October. The winner of the £40,000 prize will be announced on 2 December 2013.