The 2019 Turner Prize has been awarded to all four shortlisted artists, who will split the £40,000 prize.
At a ceremony at the Turner Contemporary in Margate on Tuesday evening, the judges announced that they had acquiesced with the request made by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani that they be named the ‘collective winner’ of the award. In her speech, Cammock described the action as a ‘symbolic gesture of cohesion’.
This year’s Turner prize has been one of the most political in its history with work exploring themes of migration, patriarchy, torture and civil rights. The artists asked judges not to pit those subjects against each other, submitting a letter in which they stated that, ‘the politics we deal with differ greatly, and for us it would feel problematic if they were pitted against each other, with the implication that one was more important, significant or more worthy of attention than the others.’ Their request constituted, they wrote, a ‘collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity – in art as in society’.
3 December 2019
