They asked to be judged as a collective – so all four shortlisted artists won. They explain how our toxic political climate made them take a stand against individualism
The idea came to them in June. The Turner prize nominees had arrived in Margate to visit the Turner Contemporary. The four artists – Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, Tai Shani– had never met before and, as they talked in a white-walled meeting room facing the North Sea, they began to discuss proposing themselves to the judges as a collective. Their idea was, in other words, that there should be no single winner of this year’s Turner prize. It was a plan for a hijack – albeit, says Cammock, “a considered hijack”.
“I don’t remember who said it out loud first,” says Shani, whose sensuous, voluptuous work for the prize’s exhibition combines performance, text and installation to imagine a post-patriarchal world. “We’d all thought about it. For me, it felt like being nominated was a huge recognition. I was really happy with that. When someone suggested it, we were very cohesive immediately.”
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