On December 3 the winner of 2019’s edition of the most prestigious award in British Contemporary art, the Turner Prize, was announced live on BBC News. Regardless of its usual importance, one could have been forgiven for asking – was anyone going to watch? With just over a week to go before the UK’s most polarizing general election of a generation, and with intense flooding in the North of England raising increasing concern over climate change, was there simply too much urgent news for Contemporary art to have any mainstream presence? The glittering awards ceremony, held in a vintage theme-park in Margate, was already a concern of only a privileged circle. It now felt hopelessly vain and out-of-touch.

As events transpired, this observation had struck none more strongly than the nominees of the award themselves. A shock decision saw all four artists co-sign a letter to the judging panel declaring that they had “formed a collective” and were requesting to share the winner’s title – as well as equal portions of the £40,000 prize money. The Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, announced the unprecedented decision to a standing ovation.

The bookie’s favorites to win had been Oscar Murillo, the Columbian-born artist who tackles themes of globalization and displacement, and whose paintings saw a meteoric rise in auction-house prices earlier this year, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose film installation on “ear-witness” testimony described the process of archiving the auditory experiences of prisoners in a Syrian-regime prison.

The other two nominees were Helen Cammock, a former social worker who entered a 99-minute cinematic collage testifying to the under-recorded role of women in the Civil Rights Movement in Derry, Ireland and Tai Shani, whose conceptually dense installation imagined a post-patriarchal universe of candy-pink science fiction.

The Turner Prize-winners’ collaborative statement was read by Cammock, the nominee that the press had unduly, but almost unanimously, deemed least likely to win. It asserted that all four artists were unified in their aim of bearing witness to social injustice.

“We came to a collective decision that we, the four nominated artists, are all the winners of this year’s 2019 Turner Prize. This year, the jury have selected a group of artists who are all involved in forms of social or participatory practice. We believe, when grouped together, that such practices become incompatible with the competition format, whose tendency is to divide and individualize.”

The artists’ joint statement pulled no punches in its attack on the current UK government; Murillo also sported a “Vote Labour” sticker, and Shani a typographic necklace which read, “TORIES OUT.” The state-owned BBC is chartered to retain impartiality in political matters, but a televised live stream left little margin for reframing.

“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 renewal of the right, the rise of fascism and an era of the Conservative’s hostile environment, that has paradoxically made each of us and many of our friends and family again increasingly unwelcome in Britain. And this is supported by an environment of normalized racism and ideologically-driven brutality, of austerity, the privatization of our social services and healthcare, destruction of education, a corrupt media and the prioritization of corporate interest above all else. It is this we seek to stand against by making this symbolic gesture of cohesion.”

So far, mainstream British media outlets have consistently avoided reporting the provocative sections of Cammock’s speech, focusing instead on the affront of a joint win to “the spirit of competition”. So the argument goes, the judges’ decision follows a deeply unsatisfying, if not outright exasperating trend of formerly star-making prizes whose power has been dampened by sharing. This year’s Booker Prize, for instance, courted controversy when it was announced that the title was to go to both Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.

There is, perhaps, something particularly niggling about contestants who themselves suggest sharing an award. It smacks of a happy-clappy PR-stunt, or infuriatingly excessive politeness. “Let’s just agree that we’re both very good,” one might imagine the clamor, like two British people vying for the same patch of pavement, stuck in a cringing loop of insisting that the other goes first. So critics argue, it effectively means that no-one will benefit from the accolade. The prize money will be split four ways, as will the celebrity, and no quadrant could have a career-making impact. Even before the title was carved up, very few Britons outside of the art industries could name a recent Turner Prize winner aside from perhaps Grayson Perry; both Shani and Cammock reported that they intended to spend their £10,000 winnings on living costs.