The Bogside Artists Call on "Turner Prize" to Pull Out of Derry!

DERRY, Northern Ireland - Nov. 30, 2013 - PRLog -- "If the Turner Prize committee believes  freedom of expression they should certainly not be holding their competition in Derry where marginalization and denigration of us three artists, The Bogside Artists, is almost mandatory in the media and political circles." (The Bogside Artists).

This year 2013 and for the first time out of London TheTurner Prize is to be held in Derry, second only in population to Belfast, in Northern Ireland. This is in accord with the city's nomination as UK City of Culture 2013. Derry saw the emergence of what is termed 'The Troubles' and was the scene of the Bloody Sunday massacre that shocked the world, when fourteen people were gunned down by the British Army (1972) in the Bogside and thirty-six people wounded.

Since the peace accord of 1998 the Sinn Fein Nationalist party has joined with the DUP (Unionist - in favour of union with England) in dumbing down the Bogside and the world famous murals of The People's Gallery.

No mention is ever made of the words "The People's Gallery" or indeed of "The Bogside Artists", Tom Kelly, William Kelly and Kevin Hasson who painted all twelve of the large scale outdoor murals that comprise it. And during the recent National Fleadh organized and governed by Sinn Fein who fielded their own stewards to control the massive crowd of an estimated 430,000 over a three day period, visitors were not encouraged but rather discouraged from visiting the Bogside the acknowledged crucible of The Troubles.

Thus,The Bogside Artists have decided to express their view of the Turner Prize in the medium they know best, painting.

It has to be said that the Bogside Artists never ever supported the City of Culture and publicly declared their opposition. Said spokesman Tom Kelly: "We couldn't support it because we saw it as an opportunity for the political shrewdies to fill their pockets while the little people got sod-all as usual. It surprises us that nobody takes simple cognizance of the fact that 'democracy' is a joke in Northern Ireland and especially Derry and here we are hosting an event that claims to represent freedom of expression. If the people who run the show really believed their Turner Prize is a clarion call for artistic freedom, they would NOT be in Derry, of all places, which is akin to a vegetarian club hosting its annual get-together in an abattoir. But if you look at their sponsors you may well get a different perspective on their agenda and come to see that the support of novelty is in essence an attack on freedom of expression as novelty may be aesthetically offensive and that is good for business but real art, real freedom of expression challenges all power structures including and especially The Turner Prize. There are clearly no socialist organizations supporting the Turner Prize and yet back-room revolutionaries in Derry who are happy to take the Queen's Shilling for services rendered are okay with it and actively support it. See if you can figure that out because we cannot. The Turner Committee should at least know about the  discrimination against us, The Bogside Artists, that has no foundation whatsoever except in Sinn Fein's naked proprietorial hegemony in the city that would put the lowest ranks of the Mafia to shame. They would know that we three artists have been campaigned against and frozen out completely by state organizations such as DCAL, the N.Ireland Tourist Board, our local City council who refuse to maintain the upkeep of the murals thanks to pressure from the DUP/Sinn Fein alliance. What a joke is there my friends!... and what evil for want of a better word. The committee would know that the local press, has totally frozen us out, and published nothing about us in the last four years unless it be negative with a view to robbing our work and us of all merit, artistic and otherwise; although it is an established fact known to every dog in the street that thousands of people come here each year from all over the world to see our  art work. Relentlessly, they dumb us down and rob our work of all quiddity and all significance, artistic or historical. They do this day in, day out, year in, year out, demoniacally misleading tourists with a view to robbing them of any appreciation of our work or any regard they might have had for it before arrriving in Derry to see it. Is this not what Hitler did, or are we all missing something here?  The murals are robbed of significance by morally redundant tour operators who have no more regard for art than a Bolivian coal miner has for Chopin. One solitary mention (Derry Journal) was made of the mural that we created in the European Culture Capital Maribor Slovenia, last year, a mural that was unveiled by the Dalai Lama and four Nobel Laureates as well as the Mayor of Maribor, and in front of a large crowd too, many of them paparazzi, in the public square. And that one solitary mention of the event in 'our' Derry Journal was negative in the extreme. Our simple conclusion is that Sinn Feins' projection of their own hidden evil onto us is responsible for most of this, if not all of it. That hallowed place, The Bogside, is viewed by them as their private real estate, to profit from, as they do year after year on the back of our murals' popularity that they are dedicated to destroying because they had no say in the creation of the murals and therefore can lay no claim to them. They are copyrighted to The Bogside Artists. Get it? Our book also tells the truth that not a single newspaper in the North of Ireland or England reviewed. If the Tate organizers are champions of creative freedom as they want the world to believe; and if they know what they now have no excuse for not knowing, they should pull out of Derry in protest as to how we three local artists, The Bogside Artists, have been treated over a very long time. Read our blog. They can no longer plead ignorance; and if they are going to support oligarchic, elitest, self-serving denigration of artists' work that is fascist in essence, against the unversal acclaim our work is held abroad, then they are no champions of art. If they do not pull out then their nature and character are at last revealed to the whole world, viz; The Turner Prize has nothing whatever to do with art but is a political, manipulative, elitest sham. Let us finally say, in yet one more attempt to enlighten the gullible, that if the Chinese artist Wei Wei who has been made much of by Western Media as an example of targeted oppression in art had experienced for a month what we have had to put up with for the last twenty years he would have ran to jail instead of pleading to get out of it."

Whatever protest The Bogside Artists have in mind, Tom would not divulge, but it will be made manifest "when the time is ripe". It will, we can all presume, be worth waiting for. And we can also presume that it will have something more to say than the typical winner of the prize.