Collective

Abstract

the four short-listed artists for the prestigious British art award, the Turner Prize, were granted the award as a collective. The nominees had worked ahead of the prize committees' decision by founding a collective, that, on their request, were awarded the prize, to be equally distributed between the members of the collective. With this gesture the four artists, who each one of them has a critical and socially oriented artistic practice, wished to oppose the reciprocal competitiveness between the nominees, implied in the mechanics of the prize and the nomination practice in order to "send a strong message about collectivism and solidarity" to a British society historically torn apart by Brexit and a critical election campaign (Prize presenter Edward Enninful at the prize ceremony, BBC December 4, 2019).As Sarah Charalambides writes in her contribution to this issue of Peripeti -journal of dramaturgical studies on "Collective", the question about commons is "not so much what creative practicians may share, but rather how they make connections with others". This is precisely the lesson realized by the Turner Prize artists. As such, the four artists are not a functioning collective, they do not work together and are not committed to a common project but to each of their individual careers. When they, in spite of this, still insist on acting as a collective in relation to the prizing of their work, it is an expression of a new resistance towards the hyper individualization of the art market that highly profiled awards such as the Turner Prize are part of. About a month earlier, the Danish author Jonas Eika also intervened radically in a prestigious prize ceremony, when he gave his now fabled acceptance speech upon the reception of the Nordic Council Literature Prize for the short story collection Efter solen (After the sun, 2018). Doubtless, Eika's speech stirred attention due to its clear political message and opposition to the state racism that Eika identified in the immigration policy of the Nordic countries, and the fact that a number of the responsible politicians, including the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen, were stuck in the first row, all dressed up for the formal ceremony and struggling to maintain a dignified face for the cameras.However, in the current context it is foremost the speech's frontal attack of on the implicit premise of the prestigious award that interests us. Like the personal artist interview, a form that increasingly