Hundreds of children get involved with Margate NOW as town continues to celebrate Turner Prize 2019 following momentous winners' result

Hundreds of children are getting involved with Margate NOW (28 September – 12 January 2020), an inspiring festival of art, events and performances guest curated by Russell Tovey, as Margate continues its exciting momentum following the historic Turner Prize 2019 ceremony held in the town earlier this week.

Award-winning local theatre and performance company 1927 is collaborating with hundreds of local children for their latest project, Raree Tales. 1927 has spent the autumn collaborating with every year 5 pupil in seven Margate Primary schools and young people from Arts Education Exchange to create seven animated folk-tales. The tales will be shared in bespoke Raree Boxes (animation peep hole boxes) at locations across Margate from 1 December – 12 January, alongside pop up outdoor animations.

To coincide with the festival and Turner Prize 2019, a group of pupils from local primary school Drapers Mills has also helped to create an alternative map of the local area to showcase Margate through their eyes. Turner Contemporary’s learning team and artist Sam Ayre held workshops and a guided walk of the town with the children before creating the map. It will be displayed at key points around the town, including on Turner Contemporary’s terrace for the remainder of Turner Prize 2019, and it will be distributed around Margate during the exhibition and festival.

Alongside these initiatives, with the exhibition running until 12 January 2020, a new burst of events and programmes have recently been launched coinciding with the Turner Prize 2019 Winner Announcement.

For instance, Dreamland is presenting NOWLAND: a series of impressive cultural events throughout the town as part of the festival. Taking place away from the main theme park in venues across Margate, these arts events will showcase the talent, creativity and expertise of local artists and musicians to help grow the town’s unique night-time creative economy.  As part of this, Parakeet, the brilliant theatre show that was developed with young people in Margate, is soaring back to the town in a homecoming show on 6 December after an impressive run at Edinburgh Fringe.

More of the upcoming highlights include:

• Multi-disciplinary artist Jessica Jordan-Wrench has a new commission at Margate train station in collaboration with Southeastern. Visitors will be met with a text installation, based around a purpose built split-flap display, exploring the radically unstable concept of ‘now’.
• A new interactive commission on Turner Contemporary’s terrace from Yuri Suzuki uses artificial intelligence to bring together digital sound and sculpture. In collaboration with Kent Libraries, Turner Contemporary has worked with participants across Kent to contribute to the commission.
• A group of young people, who have been referred through local schools due to challenges faced in mainstream education, will be working with local illustrator and artist Kavel Rafferty to create large-scale street art pieces as part of The Re-invention of Daily Life: Arts Education Exchange. They will be finding beauty in the mundane and banal, the everyday and the un-noticed.
• Round in Circles CIC, a Margate-based production company that creates socially-engaged programmes of events and performances, will be showcasing their dance and film work through a series of film projection installations. It celebrates key inspirations, a crossover of dance genres, theatre, drag and site.

Margate NOW launched across Margate in September, to mark the opening of the world famous Turner Prize 2019 exhibition coming to Turner Contemporary. This unique project brings together a diverse group of partners, from Turner Contemporary to Dreamland, Margate Festival and local companies such as Open School East and 1927, in a bid to nurture Margate’s creative ecology during Turner Prize 2019. Tens of thousands of visitors have already experienced and enjoyed the festival and everything it has to offer during this exciting time for the area.

This year saw a first for Turner Prize in its 35 year history. On Tuesday (3 December), British Vogue Editor-in-Chief Edward Enninful awarded the Prize to all four shortlisted artists on the night – Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani – after they formed themselves into a collective and asked the jury to consider giving them all the title. In recognition of these artists’ shared commitment to urgent social and political causes, the jury unanimously decided to honour that request.

Turner Prize 2019, with work by the four winning artists, is currently on show at Turner Contemporary until 12 January 2020. Entry to Turner Prize 2019 at Turner Contemporary is free. The exhibition has attracted almost 100,000 visitors since opening to the public on 28 September 2019.