Turner Prize

On Saturday the 23rd of October I drove to Coventry to The Herbert Art Gallery to see the Turner Prize 2021.

Since 1984 the Turner Prize has been a major cultural event, a list of past winners reads like a who’s who of contemporary art - Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Lubaina Himid, Grayson Perry. But Welsh artists have been largely absent, nominated a couple of times, Welsh sculptor Richard Deacon won in 1987, but apart from that the Turner Prize has largely passed Wales by.

This year there is a Welsh nominee. Gentle/Radical is a collective (as are all the nominees this year) and was established in 2016/17 as a collaborative cultural project based in Cardiff’s Riverside neighbourhood. It is made up of community activists, conflict resolution trainers, faith ministers, equalities practitioners, youth workers, land workers, writers and artists. They organise community film screenings, grassroots symposia, performative works, talks and gatherings that bring people together. Their aim to rethink how we live with each other in more equitable ways.

Their work is the first of the 5 nominees that you encounter as you enter The Herbert Art Gallery’s Turner Prize exhibition. The first thing you see are the words of Iolo Morganwg (1747 – 1826) printed on paper tablecloths. These tablecloths are ones that Gentle/Radical use in their community events. They normally carry bowls and plates of shared food but here they carry the words of Iolo Morganwg.

Morganwg is a fascinating, almost mythological character, an unreliable historian and forger and a poet dedicated to peace. He had an undeniable impact on Welsh culture, most notably by creating the Gorsedd ceremony which opens every National Eisteddfod in Wales.

The full Gorsedd prayer reads:

And in protection, strength;

And in strength, understanding;

And in understanding, knowledge;

And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice;

And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it;

And in that love, the love of all existences;

From here you enter into Gentle/Radical’s main space where three screens mounted on simple wooden frames at one end face a wall onto which is projected choir leader Mary Anne Roberts teaching a room full of people Iolo Morganwg’s Welsh Gorsedd prayers set to music, accompanied by the Crwth, a traditional Welsh instrument somewhere between a lyre and a violin. These works written in the 18th century are a reimagining of Welsh culture lost to colonialism.

The three screens which carry films of Gentle/Radical members reading letters to each other take turns with Mary Anne’s teaching of the sung prayer. The pace is slow, each takes turn, and you sit in between, observing, but somehow part of the action, swiveling between the letters and the learning of the song. Between these two video works is a sprawling diagram drawn onto the wall connecting the two filmed works and showing all the branches that radiate out and feed in, from healing justice to composting.

This felt to me to be a lesson in care, a lesson in nurture, and a lesson in process – it is the learning of the song we see, not the performance. After nearly two years of global pandemic this is a lesson in how to take care of people, and where to start. Gentle/Radical start at the heart of their organization, with artists and staff members, those they work with the most. And many of these people are members of groups worst affected by the pandemic: artists, freelancers, people of colour. The work is accessible, anybody could understand it, but I also feel that it is a message to the art world. Big galleries have been shedding staff like autumn leaves, the Southbank Centre losing a third of its staff in 2020 and Tate recently making 295 people redundant. Gentle/Radical’s work counters that, this is a message that says nurture and take care of your core, your heart, that it’s the people who work for and with you that matter the most.

So how does this Turner Prize work model care? I think at its heart it is about listening, listening and amplification. Which is exactly what you do when you learn a song, and we see just that on one wall. And on the screens, we hear people taking care of each other, people listening, people being listened to without interruption, their words there to be digested and reflected on, people’s words of care being given a platform, one of the biggest platforms in the art world. And the words are beautiful, there are stories of diaspora, of missing homes far away, of how to feel at home in a new place, how to reconcile different customs and sensibilities. There are stories of God and sexuality, how in queerness one can be true to the way that God made you. There are stories of grief, of how to bear it and how sometimes you can’t. These are the big things, the stuff of life, all talked about with delicacy and compassion.

This message echoes much of Gentle/Radical’s work. Their 2020 online event Anthologies of care was an incredibly enriching four and a half hours of films, conversations and spoken word about self-care, healing, resistance and “our potential wholeness, our radical wellness, and how we weave cosmic connection to self”.  

This work made me think about my role as community art coordinator. How the “community” I deliver art to is almost never local artists and certainly never Oriel Myrddin Gallery staff, and maybe that is something I need to reassess. Perhaps if you are not starting with that core, that heart, you are not equipped to go out into the wider community. This aligns with many health-care models, like patient centered care.

I must confess some bias in favour of Gentle/Radical’s work, I visited the exhibition with my friend Rabab Ghazoul who founded Gentle/Radical in 2016/17. I am drawn to work like theirs that speaks to people, centers justice, and acknowledges the importance of connection and relationships. At the Turner Prize exhibition, I was also interested to see the work of Array Collective. Another company from the margins, another country, Northern Ireland, far from the artworld centers in England.

Array Collective are a collective of artists and activists from Belfast. They create collaborative actions in response to social issues affecting themselves, their communities and allies. Array reclaim and question traditional identities associated with Northern Ireland in playful ways that merge performance, protest, ancient mythology, photography, installation and video.

The Druithaib’s Ball, is a new work for Turner Prize 2021. In Belfast it was a wake for the centenary of Ireland’s partition attended by semi-mythological druids along with a community of artists and activists wearing hand-made costumes. At the Herbert, the event has been transformed into an immersive installation. An imagined síbín (a ‘pub without permission’) hosts a film created from the Belfast event.

I loved this piece. It is eclectic and there is a lightness to it although it deals with big issues. The aesthetic of home-made costumes, swan headpieces made from tin foil, appealed to the community arts practitioner in me. It was accessible, it modelled accessibility. The film contains songs and speeches all of interest and value and the síbín is full of wonderful details like cigarette stubs in ashtrays and chips going cold on a plate. I’m sure I missed a lot of references, but it felt like submersion in a rich and fully thought-out world, a real world, and it felt like a privilege to go and sit in that world and absorb what it had to say.

By contrast I felt that Black Obsidian Sound System was rather impenetrable. B.O.S.S. was established in 2018 to bring together a community of queer, trans and non-binary black people and people of colour involved in art, sound and radical activism. Following the legacies of sound system culture they wanted to learn, build and sustain a resource for collective struggles. The London-based system is available to use or rent by community groups and others with the purpose of amplifying and connecting them.

Black Obsidian Sound System’s exhibition features two spaces. The inner space is an immersive environment combining film, light, a sound score and sculpture, first exhibited at FACT for Liverpool Biennial (2021). Using archival images, the installation reflects the ways in which marginalised groups have developed methods of coming together against a background of repression and discrimination in the UK. It positions sound culture as a source of collective strength and encounter, where kinship is found and reciprocated. B.O.S.S. considers the speaker as a totem for creating a sacred space, where one can be moved, and experience collective pleasure and healing.

The second space makes the collective’s working practices and artistic labour visible. It will be an evolving discursive/studio space to archive, document and connect with invisibilised communities in the local area and amplify their collective voice. B.O.S.S. will host a livestream radio broadcast in collaboration with community radio group Hillz FM, and hold a workshop to build the Baby B.O.S.S. system in conjunction with local activist and community groups in Coventry.

I found the spaces cold, the aesthetic of thick black PVC drapes and cold bluish LED rope lights felt inhospitable after the humanity on display in the Array and Gentle/Radical spaces. I wanted to feel the bass of the sound system but even that felt muted, toned down, the space felt somehow empty, devoid of something.

Cooking Sections address the environmental impact of intensive food production. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their work looks at how food production transforms landscapes. Using site-responsive installation, performance and film, they explore the boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics.

Salmon: Traces of Escapees is an audio and film installation that explores the environmental impact of salmon farms in Scotland. It reveals the gap between common perceptions of farmed salmon as an affordable luxury, and the reality of its mounting environmental costs – with excrement, drugs, synthetic colour and parasites polluting the surrounding waters. Their room was large and dark with films of the salmon in their circular netted enclosures projected onto the floor. The circles come and go and change colour and can be walked over much to visiting children’s delight. A disembodied voice read out facts and figures about salmon farming in a rather actorly way. Somehow the slickness of the presentation rather removed me from the interesting and important content. Again, it felt a little cold.

The installation continues Cooking Sections’ questioning of the impact of food habits on climate change and proposes CLIMAVORE (rather than herbivore or carnivore) as a form of eating that adapts to the climate. Originated and based in the Isle of Skye since 2016, the project works with communities towards ocean regeneration, promoting alternative ingredients which improve water quality and cultivate marine habitats.

The final nominee is Project Art Works who collaborate with people who have complex support needs. Their work is at the intersection of art and care and takes multiple forms. Their studios support a broad range of independent and collaborative practices with neurodivergent artists, who take part on their own terms to produce paintings, drawings, sculptural objects and film. Alongside the studios, the Support Collective brings together those who care for people with complex support needs to share experience and protect rights through training, resources and advocacy. Project Art Works organise events and projects that work towards greater visibility and understanding of neurodiversity in culture.

At the heart of their presentation for Turner Prize 2021 is a space that holds a physical and digital archive of over 4,000 works produced by neurodivergent artists and makers over two decades. A film of the archive within the central structure shows a small number of works selected for exhibition in collaboration with the Herbert’s curatorial team.

There is a studio set up for making work at the far end of the gallery. This is a place for conversation as well as collaborative and independent practice by artists who benefit from supported environments, so that they can represent themselves within the exhibition. Ideas of interdependence and structures of support provide the context for a range of workshops, creative events and dialogues facilitated by the Project Art Works’ artistic team over the course of the exhibition.

The art in this exhibition is incredible. There are many amazing pieces on display, I particularly loved the animals and birds of Neville Jermyn. But I found the film somehow distracting, even mawkish at times. I felt like the artworks stood by themselves and didn’t need this demonstration of the disabilities of the artists, that somehow that detracted from the work. However, it is clear that Project Art Works is an amazing and valuable organisation and it’s clear that we need more organisations like that. Maybe even one in every town, and definitely one in Carmarthen!

The Turner Prize will be awarded on 1 December 2021 and broadcast live on the BBC.

Written by Community Art Co-ordinator, Emily Laurens