The Belfast artists built an illicit drinking den and filled it with banners, ashtrays and scrawled-on mirrors to create a pointed portrait of Northern Ireland. What will they do with the £25,000 prize?
It’s the morning after the night before, the night in which the 11-strong, Belfast-based Array Collective, along with two babes-in-arms and one tiny golden-haired child, stepped on to the podium at Coventry Cathedral in their sparkling finery to receive the Turner prize. Three of them – Emma Campbell, Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell and Stephen Millar – have volunteered to brave hangovers and speak for this group of friends. Each has their own artistic practice, but they won the prize in their guise as a collective, through which they campaign on such issues as women’s rights, language rights and LGBT rights, with wild costumes, clever banners and a great deal of dark humour.
When you enter their section of the Turner prize exhibition, at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry, you are enfolded into the dark, cosy and faintly anarchic arms of a lovingly recreated síbín, or illicit bar, where every detail – from the banners hanging from the ceiling to the ashtrays painted with Ulster’s red hand – has some story, some significance in their history of campaigning, on often difficult and painful issues such as abortion.
