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Celebrations to mark this year’s Turner Prize 2019 are continuing in Margate with a series of impressive and fascinating arts, events and performances.

The seaside town is hosting this year’s prestigious competition at Turner Contemporary and you can check out the exhibition of work by the four artists - Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani - shortlisted for the award at the famous gallery.

As part of the build-up to the grand award presentation on Tuesday, December 3, Margate has been gripped by Margate NOW, an ongoing art, events and performance festival.

Click here to see the full programme.

The winning artist will be unveiled at the award ceremony which will also be broadcast live on the BBC as the official broadcast partner for the Turner Prize.

The Margate NOW festivities will run until January 12 next year, when the Turner Prize exhibition also closes at Turner Contemporary.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Artist and ‘private ear’ Abu Hamdan creates audio-video installations, audio-archives and performances.

For Turner Prize 2019, Abu Hamdan is presenting a sequence of three time-based works stemming from research exploring ‘earwitness’ testimony: evidence heard rather than seen.

This research originates from an investigation Abu Hamdan undertook with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture into the Syrian regime prison of Saydnaya.

He conducted earwitness interviews with six survivors to recall their acoustic memories and solicit testimony about what was happening inside the prison.

These interviews had a profound impact on Abu Hamdan’s thought and practice, and he has dedicated this body of work to reflecting on, and attempting to express, what those prisoners taught him about the relationship of sound to memory, architecture and language.

Helen Cammock

Helen Cammock is presenting The Long Note - a film that examines the overlooked role of women in the civil rights movement in Derry, Northern Ireland that began in 1968.

Weaving together archive material, original footage and contemporary interviews, The Long Note connects the struggles for civil rights in Northern Ireland to broader class, race and gender struggles globally in the late 1960s.

Working in film, performance, printmaking and photography, Cammock explores the complexities of history and how histories are told, incorporating multiple voices and forms of language, while always acknowledging her own identity and voice.

Cammock’s presentation also includes two performances, a reading space and a series of screen prints, Shouting in Whispers, which combines her own texts and quotations from sources ranging from the Trinidad-born political activist Claudia Jones to the group Public Enemy.

Oscar Murillo

Incorporating painting, sculptural installation, video and performance, Oscar Murillo’s work explores globalisation and capitalism: exchange and movement, migration and community.

Murillo’s work at the exhibition focuses on the political and socio-economic moment in the UK.

A group of papier mâché figures, which represent a mobile and globalised workforce, have travelled to the exhibition by Southeastern highspeed train.

These are brought together with two large-scale bodies of un-stretched paintings, surge (social cataracts) and The Institute of Reconciliation, which reflect on ‘social blindness’ and ‘the darkness of the contemporary moment.’

Across Kent, schools are taking part in Murillo’s Frequencies project, an archive of canvases created by school students throughout the world.

Tai Shani

Tai Shani works with performance, film, installation and sculpture.

Taking inspiration from varied mythologies, histories and fiction, she creates dark and fantastical worlds, which while often disturbing, are full of utopian potential.

For Turner Prize 2019, Shani presents a new installation version of DC: Semiramis.

This four-year project takes inspiration from Christine de Pizan’s 15th century proto-feminist text The Book of the City of Ladies.

With DC Shani creates a world in which historical events, science fiction and myths combine, building a radical vision of a future world born of an alternative past.

DC: Semiramis is made up of twelve chapters, each of which centres around a key character.

All twelve chapters are presented within this installation, activating the theatrical setting via a newly-produced video narration.

Every other year the prize is hosted at a different venue outside of London.

It is being hosted for the first time in Margate.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that JMW Turner, as well as Turner Contemporary, will feature on the new £20 note when it comes into circulation in February next year.

Click here to learn more about JMW Turner and Turner Contemporary featuring on the new £20 note.

Since opening its doors in 2011, Turner Contemporary has generated over £70 million for the local economy, led to the opening of over 150 new businesses and attracted over 3.4 million visits.

The prize and the Margate gallery are both named after English painter JMW Turner - who was said to be both controversial and innovative for his time during the 18th and 19th centuries and wanted to establish a prize for young artists.