Wallinger: Why I had to win the Turner

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Head Turner: Mark Wallinger with his anti war protest replica

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The winner of the 2007 Turner Prize has launched a searing attack on the infringement of civil rights that stops protests in Parliament Square.

Mark Wallinger, 48, said the Government legislation that banned demonstrations was undemocratic and should be repealed.

The artist was speaking in Liverpool as he won the prestigious £25,000 prize for his work, State Britain, which was a recreation of the giant anti-Iraq war protest of banners and posters mounted by Brian Haw opposite the Houses of Parliament.

Although he is showing a two-andahalf hour video of himself wandering a Berlin gallery dressed in a bear suit for this year's prize exhibition in Liverpool, it was his strongly political installation that secured him the prestigious award at the second attempt.

Wallinger, who grew up in Chigwell, Essex, and now lives in Waterloo, admitted he had been practising losing with good grace for months and could not believe he had won.

But he added: "I won, I think, because State Britain was the best thing shown anywhere this year. I don't have to be humble about that." The artist said it was "absurd" how "quiet and quiescent" British people had been about the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act that made protest in Westminster illegal.

"The police have been given the power to make any conditions that they wish and this is against the Magna Carta. The law was largely forged to get rid of Brian. It makes me very angry indeed," he said.

But he praised the Tate, which commissioned State Britain and showed it at Tate Britain, for having the courage to support him.

The gallery gave the installation the go-ahead hours before 78 police moved in to dismantle Brian Haw's peace camp. Wallinger had been recording it photographically for several months before its destruction.

"I just think it was necessary really. Brian had been painted as a crank and as an eccentric so there were a limited number of people who crossed the road to look at it. But [banning the protest] seemed to be something that was fundamentally against the rights that had been enshrined in this country since the Magna Carta - but not by this paranoid government.

"The great thing about State Britain was it pretty much felt like a public service. It just seemed essential that people should see it. Once we start eroding freedom of speech then where is the next stage?"

The curators and critics who judged this year's prize praised State Britain for being "visceral and historically important".

Nicholas Serota, the Tate's director, said of Wallinger's win: "Mark has been making work for nearly 25 years of real integrity that deals with some really big issues of identity and class."

Wallinger wanted his video, Sleeper, not State Britain to be shown at the exhibition because it has never been exhibited in Britain before. He beat Nathan Coley, Zarina Bhimji and his close friend Mike Nelson to received the prize from Dennis Hopper, the Hollywood star who is a painter and avid art collector.

Brian Haw was also at the ceremony. He said: "The Government and the corrupt police and the whole system wanted to bury it, they couldn't cope with the embarrassment of everything. But thanks to Mark and the Tate, we conquered the establishment."

Dull, tedious, self-pompous ... Brian Sewell's verdict on the artist

Mark Wallinger may have impressed the Turner Prize judges but he has failed to please the Evening Standard art critic.

Brian Sewell has criticised Wallinger as a photographer, a painter and a sculptor. He said: "As a photographer he has done nothing not already done a million times in the sports pages of newspapers" and called him "a dull painter of horses". Sewell also once said: "Wallinger's work is ... straightforward to the point of tedious banality."

He has not reviewed State Britain, but writing about a show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2001, Sewell concluded: "None of his utterly negligible conceits, his silly semi-blasphemies ... is worth such a self-pompous installation."

Sewell is not Wallinger's only critic. When this year's Turner nominees were announced Will Self said:"What can the artistic justification be for short-listing Wallinger's infantile work? There was nothing 'political' about Haws's camp unless unabashed na'vetÈ is an ideology and there's nothing artistic about Wallinger's slavish copying."

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