Turner Prize 2021: A Personal Reflection

On 29 December 2021 as the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 settled in to its rampage across the UK, my party of three managed to visit Coventry and spend much of the day in the delightful Herbert Gallery and Museum. We tentatively booked our free tickets a couple of weeks before, unsure until the morning of 26 December that we'd even get away to the West Midlands to visit family. Testing negative on the Wednesday morning, Andrew, his mum (textile artist Jacky Shail) and I struck out east from Malvern to the 2021 UK City of Culture and found the Herbert. The staff were welcoming, informative and helpful. We felt as secure as could be from seeing them regularly cleaning surfaces and kindly but firmly putting across a message of 'no mask, no entry' to anyone not covering their germ-holes.

I'm going to mostly focus on the Turner Prize show in these notes, but it's also worth pointing out the venue's other offerings. The Herbert's museum section traces Coventry's history from the medieval to contemporary periods, particularly highlighting the city's former distinction in the weaving industry - the loom on display in the main foyer is something to behold - and the devastation Coventry experienced during the blitz in World War II. We also enjoyed the Coventry Biennial, HYPER-POSSIBLE, in which I was most drawn to Luke Routledge's animatronic installation The Door in the Wall and Leilah Babirye's sculpture made of discarded materials, including bicycle tyre inner tubes for dreadlocks, as a way to explore Ugandan identity in view of its stringent anti-homosexuality laws.

With themes around DIY approaches to art and politics, the Biennial aptly complemented the Turner Prize exhibition. We spent just under two hours in the five galleries, although we could have happily stayed in Array Collective's sibín all day. I'd only been to the Turner Prize once before back in 2014 in Tate Britain when I had some funding to pay for the trip and was researching Duncan Campbell's work anyway when he was nominated and went on to win. My research and teaching had focused on the work of other nominees (e.g. Willie Doherty) and winners (e.g. Steve McQueen) before, and due to changed circumstances hadn't caught up properly with that of Helen Cammock who was nominated for her gallery film The Long Note which was commissioned by Void Gallery, Derry, in 2018, to celebrate the women involved in the emergence of the civil rights movement upon its fiftieth anniversary. This film was nominated in 2019, the year in which the four nominees requested the prize be shared amongst them as a collective. This decision combined with the unusual circumstances arising from the pandemic led to a very different selection process for the UK's most prestigious art prize in 2021: to recognise the work of art collectives whose practices as groups impact their surrounding communities and strive for social change, justice and equality. 

It will be no secret that my bias lies with the Belfast-based Array in whose 'pub without permission' I was able to bask in the comforting sights and glorious sounds of home. I was last in Belfast on 4 November 2019, what with one thing and another, and I hung on in the sibín for as long as I could (it got rather packed, such was its draw). For the duration of the show's run I have felt immense gratitude to Array for their thorough instagramming of the installation and its individual pieces. I knew when I got there that there was more packed into the pub than we'd manage to notice or get near. I've come to realise about myself that I prefer that in an installation - the more stuff the better, and the more the labour or indicators of the making are revealed, the better still. I think that's why we also spent a lot of time with Project Art Works who work with neurodivergent folk with complex support needs, out of whom boundless and boundary-less creativity flows. I loved that the sheer amount of this was indicated in tall, wide stacks of large canvasses housing their film, the audio in which I found striking with a mic set to high gain and pointed at unusual and often off-screen points of audition. These included the recorder's heartbeat during their Highland walks and picking up gloopy drops of thick paint landing on canvas while a hand shaking the paintbrush above is shown in close-up on-screen. 

I also appreciated the considered videos and diagrams produced by Gentle/Radical, the dizzying thought-provocation from Cooking Sections, and the physics and wordplay involved in Black Obsidian Sound Systems's installations. I felt it was special, urgent and meaningful that upon entry to the show the first visible work comprised hanging sheets imprinted with Welsh language text. This recognition of other native languages practised in the UK continued at the entry into Array's show in gallery IV with the introductory wall text privileging the Irish, and the English translation tucked over to the right inside the enclave, the corner of which housed the changing designated days banners. 

I took the time to read through the Irish text before looking at the English and was pleased that I understood the gist in places, even if the level was beyond my learning. I photographed it for reading practise. We pottered around the sibín a fair bit and I explained a few things to my crew, pointing out the Digital Film Archive - which launched and became an important resource for me during my PhD - the ceiling of protest banners, the Stenaline mop (a personal favourite of mine as it's my preferred mode of travel home, and the connotations of 'getting the boat' are always on my mind when I do), and explaining Banshee Bones to my English partner. Jacky really loved the tablecloths and the detailed plaques in the booths. I was drawn to items from collections I hadn't seen in anyone's photos such as the elephant (in the room)- shaped Northern Bank piggy bank. The old Citybus with its burgundy motifs I associate with going down the road or into town in my childhood, but they were regularly hijacked and burnt out during the conflict, a conflict that was Britain and Ireland's elephant in the room for thirty years. Then there's the Northern Bank heist in 2004 in which a still unrecovered £26million was stolen from the bank's headquarters in Belfast city centre, allegedly by the IRA, although no one has ever been convicted for the theft.

The chips on the shoulders. The Northern and Southern Tayto crisps sharing a table. The Stouts Out cans on the bar. The 'Prepared for Peas, Ready for Sausage War' banner reminding me of intimidating paramilitary murals down the road from where I grew up. The precious video installation of the Drúthaib's Ball that sucked us all in, made me tap my feet in time to the music and laugh on my own in a room otherwise full of presumably English people (Jacky, at least, is from the Welsh border) and feel sad and proud and joyous all at once. Sad that I missed all the crack, but so very happy that it all got to happen and that I could participate in a small way when I didn't think I'd see it at all. 

Being away so long, having lived in England since 2014 (part of NI's brain-drain due to the lack of jobs for those of us who struggled to get ourselves educated thinking it would give us more opportunities), and being stuck there since early 2020 (economically as well as pandemically), I always feel that I'm forgotten about back home, and that my research remains peripheral or inaccessible, or just downright ignored. There continue to be complaints that no one takes any notice or doesn't understand what's going on there. It may have been a while ago, but I published a book on a lot of it. What people mean, though, is there little in mainstream criticism and reviews, and what there is largely misses the point (wilfully, it feels). The point is often missed due to a lack of education and awareness of the less palatable parts of Britain's past. After seven and a half years of living in England I still find myself explaining my accent and saying 'well, actually, it's complicated' when I'm told I'm Irish and get bombarded with stereotypes concerning heavy drinking and high japes, because our collective centuries-long trauma remains something to be ridiculed and belittled rather than understood and confronted within one's own historical benefits of colonialism - something that's simply not taught adequately in England's schools. And so it gets rendered down in our own self-deprecating wry humour about the real war being over Northern (proper) versus Southern Taytos and not civil rights inequalities and marginalisation that became reductively sectarianised by the media machine and successive British governments not understanding or caring to understand what all the bother was about in the first place.

Like me, one way or another, most of Array's members are a product of all that: a generation old enough to remember the conflict in full swing and the peace process, but young enough to have not lost hope and to have grown into adults who want to participate in solutions to society's problems. With the conflict and then the ongoing years (or stagnation?) of transformation and restorative justice (complexities for another time) came the sidelining of continuing gaps in equality as they closed up for the rest of the UK. While abortion laws and access changed in Britain in 1967, Northern Ireland remained frozen in Victorian times. As civil partnerships and same-sex marriage became legalised (2004 and 2013 respectively) and increasingly normalised in Britain, the fight for recognition had to keep raging in NI. Even with law changes more recently due to central government interventions, implementing them is stagnant because as usual there are other big problems that are more pressing than the neglected rights of the 1.8million people in the six counties, many of whose heads are turned with their mixed, stolen, uncertain, imposed or hard-wired identities. 

At the Turner award ceremony, Array member Stephen Millar delivered their acceptance speech in Irish. Like me, Stephen is not a native speaker - we are learning as adults. There has been a growing movement amongst British or unionist-identifying people in NI to meekly discover the language of our island, and specifically our province of Ulster, that has been denied us before because we were the oppressor and it was not for us. But a lot of us have mixed heritages. I, for example, am descended from Scottish migrants, but as far as my family's genealogical knowledge and searches have so far shown, we are not 'planters' as people like me are often labelled. The Celtic connection between Scotland and Ireland has existed for longer than England's colonial reach on both places. Not every migrant from Scotland became a plantation owner and many were displaced to Ireland for far less privileged reasons. Even if that is our ancestral past, if people are willing to learn and move forward with empathy and inclusiveness, surely that is of benefit to us all. I know I feel a deeper connection to my home island through learning its language, particularly the Ulster variation with closer ties to its relative, Scottish Gaelic. This is because it's the language of the land itself, not just the people. Place names and geophysical features make sense and render their anglicisations meaningless. How I speak English as an Ulsterperson makes more sense. Pronunciations and strange spellings begin to unlock as knowledge of a complex alphabet that is more logical than it first appears expands. It feels increasingly like a mother tongue that's been denied to us, and for a range of complex reasons. Being greeted by it upon entering gallery IV felt like an embrace, a homecoming away from home. And Stephen's refusal to translate the acceptance speech for the persistent English-accented presenter of the award was not only punk defiance, it was a provocation to learn and share a language native to these islands and not be so insular and anglocentric. Why is it normal for many English speakers to have fragments of French in their common parlance but zero comprehension of Gaeilge, Scottish Gaelic or Welsh, for example? (The answer is, of course, rooted in lots and lots of colonisation on all fronts). Acts of normalising such languages became radical in this art prize setting when really - as with so many of the topics raised by the collectives that I've barely touched on - they should already be ordinary.

And there's the rub. The collectives in drawing in from the periphery the disabled, the queer, the dark-skinned, the underprivileged, the dominated, the 'fallen', the 'unfine', radicalise what many of us - silenced majorities in many cases - feel should already be normal and acceptable to the point of becoming quotidian. As for what reviewers make of it, well I think their opinions are, to be blunt, irrelevant, not least because none of the work was made to please them. To be honest, I've read few responses to the Turner Prize exhibition or Array's win. I only became aware of sniffy reviews when Ciara Hickey and Jane Morrow posted their own response to the responses. My lack of awareness comes from my own perspective as an academic researcher with minimal interest in reception studies. Experiencing a show is so subjective and I'm only really interested in what I learned or was encouraged to consider from my acts of engagement with the work. While I enjoy hearing other people's perspectives on the same, they rarely lead my own thoughts. In particular, what jobbing reviewers think has little to no bearing on my existence or analytical approach. Is cuma liom - I don't care. I'm not bothered. But as a writer I absolutely know what it is to be misunderstood, and wilfully so. As a Northern Irish person researching film, art and culture to do with NI, I absolutely know the frustration of explaining your existence for the umpteenth time, particularly when knowledge is so widely available like never before. Whenever I have read reviews for research, I feel frustrated at someone who appears to be shooting their mouth off to get clicks and shares rather than be part of a dialogue and share information. I don't know what reviewers expect to measure as 'good' art deserving of recognition. I welcome anyone disrupting the gatekeeping of fine art. I welcome the celebration and encouragement of creativity, because through that we begin to tap into areas of being human we are usually made to 'grow out of' as youths. The Turner Prize 2021 showed that people of all ages and kinds thrive and become empowered when enabled to create and try and test and play and love and be. To me that's a rip-roaring success and little else matters. More power to yous all.

Prepared for Peas selfie