This year’s Turner Prize winner is the Northern Irish artist collective Array. The 11-member Belfast-based group won the £ 25,000 Contemporary Art Award in a year that saw no individual artists, but exclusively groups of artists and activists Nomination list stood. The award-winning work “The Druithaib’s Ball” is a replica of a pub with a ceiling made of flags and banners that were created for protests and demonstrations. Surrounded by flagpoles referring to pre-Christian ancient Irish ceremonial sites, the installation was declared “a meeting place beyond the sectarian division”. This relates to the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, but also to issues such as abortion, gay rights, mental health, gentrification and welfare.
There was already criticism in Great Britain for the shortlist
Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain and chairman of the jury, said on Wednesday evening at the awards ceremony in Coventry that the array artists work “in a difficult denominational context” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. “They treat you very much important issues “, so Farquharson in his reasoning for the decision,” but bring humor, joy, joy and hope into an otherwise very tense situation. ” The award-winning work is an example of the “feeling of liberation and the post-sectarian way of thinking” for which Array stands.
This year’s shortlist for the Turner Prize was unanimously panned by British critics as being flat and over-politicized. The nominated group “Black Obsidian Sound System”, a collective of black, queer activists, responded to the shortlist by accusing them of being “instrumentalized” by the Tate and criticizing their dealings with black artists in the past. The members of the Array Collective called the award “surreal” at the award ceremony and announced that the prize money will now be invested in the creation of a “safe studio space” in Belfast.