Cows' brains, a whale's skull, and the remains of a jet engine take centre stage among the artworks created by this year's Turner Prize entrants.

LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (OCTOBER 5, 2009) REUTERS - The skeleton of a sperm whale is competing with the brain of a cow for this year's Turner Prize, Britain's annual competition of contemporary art that regularly triggers debate about what is art and what is not.
The first rooms of the show at the Tate Britain in London are dedicated to Lucy Skaer, the only woman among the nominees. Her works include tall, black, skittle-like sculptures made with coal dust and arranged in rows and in a pile on the floor.

Her work "Leviathan Edge" (2009) is a partial skeleton of a male sperm whale visible through narrow slits in the wall.

Scottish-based Richard Wright, who specialises in large wall paintings made for specific spaces, has adorned the far wall of a room with symmetrical, intricate gold-leaf patterns.

Italian-born Enrico David presents "Absuction Cardigan" (2009), a collage of sculptures, paintings and papier-mache "eggmen" described by the exhibition as a "parade of unruly characters" that represent the artist himself.

Finally, Richard Hiorns has covered half of a gallery floor with the black and grey metal dust of an atomised passenger aircraft engine, in a work designed to question our faith in technology and remind us of our own mortality. Further Hiorns works hanging on the walls contain cows' brains.

The prize has traditionally been won for controversial work and is criticised by figurative artists. Assistant curator Helen Little said Tate Britain welcomed criticism. She said: "I think one of the successes of the Turner Prize is it's the 25th Turner Prize, and one of its major successes is that it's generated a huge amount of interest in contemporary art and a huge amount of debate on contemporary art and that can only be a good thing."

Curator Lizzie Carey-Thomas also defended the institution, which dates back to 1984 and has been won by the likes of Gilbert & George, Richard Long, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst. She said: "You only have to look at the 25 years of the Turner Prize and the list of artists who have exhibited and won to understand its importance. Many of those artists are continuing to make work today and it really maps out a complete transformation in contemporary British art and public perceptions of it."

The prize has been criticised for courting controversy in previous years. Previous winners have included Grayson Perry, a cross-dressing potter, and Martin Creed, whose installation in 2001 featured lights going on and off in an empty room.

Carey-Thomas denied that the contest was deliberately provocative. "I wouldn't say the Turner Prize is controversial," she said. "I think it's had a reputation of perhaps showing challenging new art, and in particular in the 1990s with the young British artists, but it doesn't seek to be controversial. Instead it's trying to represent new developments in British art, bring them to a wider attention, and create a forum for debate."

Opponents of the award, who call themselves the "Stuckists", on Monday (October 5) stood outside the gallery on London's River Thames where the award is staged and called for the "tired" and "exhausted" show to be scrapped.

Charles Thompson, the Stuckists co-founder, said the use of cows' brains in the contest was apt. He said: "The Turner Prize is a kind of product of art world Mad Cow Disease, if you want to put it that way, it's a kind of delusion that has taken hold and in 50 years people will look back, just as we look back on a lot of Victorian art, and think it was fashionable but it's not lasted."

The winner of the prize, who picks up a cheque for £25,000 (39,800 US dollars), will be announced on December 7. Hiorns is the bookmakers' early favourite to triumph, while Wright is the 10/1 outsider.

The Turner Prize 2009 exhibition opens to the public on Tuesday (October 6) and runs until January 3, 2010.