Edward Enninful Announces All 4 Nominees Have Won The Turner Prize 2019

This year’s Turner Prize announcement was never going to be business as usual. On stage to present the prestigious award at Dreamland in Margate, Edward Enninful paid homage to the revolutionary work of this year’s four nominees – and, as it turned out, four winners. “I think art, like fashion, can tell a story about celebrating difference, can show how diverse people are – challenging ideas of race, gender and sexuality and tackling important issues in the world that we live in together,” he said before opening the winners’ envelope. “Speaking of the power of creativity, here’s something quite extraordinary. At a time of political division in Britain and conflict in much of the world, the artists wanted to use the occasion of the Turner Prize to make a strong statement of community and solidarity and have formed themselves into a collective.”

For the first time in its 35-year history, Oscar Murillo, Helen Cammock, Tai Shani and Lawrence Abu Hamdan will share the £40,000 prize between them. The artists themselves petitioned the jury to award the prize to them as a collective rather than as individuals. “When there is already so much that divides and isolates people and communities, we feel strongly motivated to use the occasion of the prize to make a collective statement in the name of commonality, multiplicity and solidarity – in art as in society,” the group wrote. The jury, chaired by director of Tate Britain Alex Farquharson, unanimously agreed to their request, noting in a statement: “Their symbolic act reflects the political and social poetics that we admire and value in their work.”

Indeed, themes of representation, identity politics, and displacement are central to each of the winners’ oeuvres. Colombia-born Murillo continually explores the right to freedom of movement and community in his work – most notably his reinterpretations of traditional Latin effigies. Meanwhile, Cammock, a former winner of the Max Mara Prize for Women, spotlights female participation in Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement in her film The Long Note, and Shani offers up an alternative universe populated entirely by female characters in her installation, DC: Semiramis. Hamdan, on the other hand, has worked with survivors of Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison for his moving audio piece, Earwitness Theatre – just one of many “private ear” investigations he has completed to protest human and civil rights violations.

Named after JMW Turner, the Turner Prize was originally founded in 1984 to recognise the talent of an artist born or based in the UK. Previous winners have famously included Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen, Wolfgang Tillmans, Grayson Perry, Lubaina Himid, and more. Works by Murillo, Cammock, Shani and Hamdan will be on display at the Turner Contemporary in Margate through 12 January – a location chosen as a nod to Turner, who claimed Margate’s skies were “the loveliest in all Europe”.