After a number of discussions between us, we came to a collective decision that we, the four nominated artists, are all the winners of this, the 2019 Turner Prize. We thank Tate and this years Jury for supporting us and recognising the merits of this decision. We would also all like to thank each person who has supported us and our work.

This year the jury, have selected a group of artists who are all engaged in forms of social or participatory practice. We believe when grouped together, such practices, become incompatible with the competition format, whose tendency is to divide and individualise.

Placing in contention the issues in our work would undermine our individual artistic efforts to show a world entangled. The issues we each deal with, are as inseparable as climate chaos is from capitalism. We each seek to use art to push at the edges of issues, mapping the bleed of one into another, across time, across sectionalities, across the realm of the real and the imagined, and through walls and borders.

The Turner Prize is given to “a British Artist” or artist working in Britain. This year, as it has often done in the past, the prize has sought to expand what it means to be “British”. We find this significant in an era marked by the rise of the right and the renewal of fascism in an era of the Conservatives hostile environment, that has paradoxically made each of us and many of our friends and family increasingly unwelcome in Britain.

This is supported by an environment of normalised racism, the ideologically driven brutality of austerity, the privatisation of social services, a corrupt media, and the prioritisation of corporate interest above all else. Isolation and exclusion are the weapons of this hostile environment. It is this we seek to stand against by making this symbolic gesture of cohesion.

In 9 days we have the chance to turn gesture into action – to vote for the collective benefit, both nationally and globally, of all of our shared futures.  

None of us had met each other prior to the Turner Prize nomination, but on our initial meeting in Margate, we quickly recognised the shared ethos that runs across our otherwise very different practices.

When there is already so much that divides people, 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.