Awarded for her explorations of community and culture, the Scottish-Indian artist highlights the importance of diasporic communities in the British art world.
The prestigious British art prize celebrated its 40th year in 2024, with a bursary of £25,000 to the winner.
Jasleen Kaur was the youngest among this year’s shortlisted artists which also featured Pio Abad, Delaine Le Bas and Claudette Johnson, who were awarded £10,000 each.
Her nominated work, Alter Altar, is a series of installations of everyday objects and immersive sound compositions, presented at Tate Britain in London for the first time in six years, after being exhibited in Margate, Coventry, Liverpool and Eastbourne.
Kaur is among the 600 artists and art workers who signed an open letter for the Tate to divest from arts organisations whose founders have ties to Israel. In her acceptance speech of the prize, Kaur expressed solidarity to protesters standing outside Tate Britain.
“I’ve been wondering why artists are required to dream up liberation in the gallery but when that dream meets life, we are shut down,” she said. “I want the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practice of politics in life to disappear.
“I want the institution to understand if you want us inside, you need to listen to us outside. We needed a ceasefire a very long time ago, we need a proper ceasefire now, an arms embargo now. Free Palestine.”
The Turner Prize, named after painter J. M. W. Turner, is awarded annually for the best British artist and nominates all mediums from sculpture to painting.
The first award was given out in 1984, and any British-based artist under the age of 50 can be nominated. Founded by a group named The Patrons of Art, this award assisted Tate in collecting artworks from up-and-coming artists while shining a media spotlight on their work.
At this year’s Turner Prize exhibition, each artist displayed their work in various ways, giving a glimpse of their nuanced identities. While Johnson and Abad’s vast rooms invited the viewers to take in sights of their portraitures and historical artefacts, Kaur and Le Bas built environments for viewers to immerse themselves in, peeking into rooms beholding installations and sculptures accompanied with audio.
British-Filipino artist Pio Abad unpacks colonial history, particularly of his home country in the Philippines. He was nominated for his solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness, presented at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum which features historical artefacts and paintings of his own personal belongings.
Through his extensive research in the museum’s archives, Abad wants to “seduce people towards knowledge”. Taking inspiration from the Philippines’ first lady Imelda Marcos, he sculpted a giant concrete replica of her diamond bracelet, the piece titled Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite. It was one of the estimated 21 billion dollars of jewellery in Marcos’ collection found during the February Revolution in 1986. His works tell repressed histories through the lens of someone who grew up experiencing them first-hand.
“My work as an artist and role as a citizen, a son or a husband are seamless. My home is where work takes shape and my understanding of family and history are entwined,” Abad explained in a conversation with Linsey Young for Tate Dialogues.
In the next room is Jasleen Kaur’s nominated exhibition, Alter Altar. It involved an Axminster carpet, family photos in large print, a vintage red car with a crocheted doily draped over it and sound playing from sculptures to accompany the space.
In her conversation for Tate Dialogues, Kaur says the audio is reminiscent of sounds heard in a prayer room, hence the chanting and melodic hums playing on a loop.
“The sound, along with all the other objects that are littered across the sky, and images of community solidarity positioned on the floor are like citations,” Kaur says. “They’re reference points to how my political education was formed or unformed, growing up.”
Kaur’s music practice is a way to immortalise history and culture, and a means of resistance: “You can burn a library full of books but you can’t burn a sound which is passed down through oral tradition.”
Intertwining modern found objects is another way she is symbolising her upbringing and beliefs. Above are bottles of Scottish soda Irn Bru and a purple scarf hanging off the suspended glass, among other everyday objects which come to life in this installation.
Delaine Le Bas brought her Romani background and personal experiences with belonging on full display; nominated for her exhibition in Vienna, titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life / A New Life is Beginning. Like the other shortlisted artists, she presents untold histories and loss, but through painted textiles and fabrics.
With a background of studying fashion and textiles at Central Saint Martins, Le Bas displays embroidery and hand-painted clothing, adorning shrines and tents that are open for viewers to admire up close as music blares from the speakers. While pretty and characterised by vibrant paint, each work represents loss; from the loss of Le Bas’s nan to the loss of land of her people.
“So much of what is out there has been written from the outside looking in,” Le Bas says about her background. Through this exhibition she is challenging said stereotypes, her artworks an intimate retelling of Le Bas as a person and as someone with Romani heritage.
Beyond the cacophony of colours and sounds are Claudette Johnson’s portraits from her solo exhibition Presence and Drawn Out, exhibited in London and New York respectively. Painted in gouache, oil, watercolour and pastels, these large-scale paintings are intricately made, with splashes of colour on the subject’s clothes or the landscape. Rather than dulling the uncoloured figures, it instead illuminates them in her portraits.
Co-founder of the Black British Women Artists Collective, Johnson challenges the representation of black people in contemporary art, relating to the people in her community and family while recently including her two sons as her list of muses.
“In traditional portraiture, the figure sits in an environment that gives you information about the character or social status of the subject,” Johnson says, in conversation with Amy Emmerson Martin for Tate Dialogues.
“I’ve lifted my figures out of their environment and displaced them. That’s a signal to my interest in the diasporic experience and the fact that we have been displaced and repositioned in a different environment.”
This year’s Turner prize showcased a lineup of majority women and non-white artists, something that has become a common sight in recent years and the subject of discussion.
While The Telegraph complained that this year’s selection has been too tame (“Aren’t you supposed to let your hair down when you turn 40, and have some fun?” their review reads), TimeOut considers the shortlist “inarguably ladened with contemporary identity politics.”
With tabloids and readers alike, a spectacle or scandal will always make headlines. We’ve seen this in the past: when Steve McQueen won in 1999 against Tracey Emin, there was more attention given to her intimate Bed installation, with the media blanketing her artwork with criticism and it was even hijacked by two Chinese artists.
While this year’s prize has been devoid of any drama or widespread scandal, art experts Sofia Coombe and Tanya Michele Amador think this year’s turnout for the prize has been nothing short of positive.
“The 2024 prize has drawn in bigger crowds than previous awards, according to Tate guest services,” Sofia says. “The increase in visitor numbers could be down to the central London location this year, or the selection of artists shortlisted, who are all worthy of their spot in the line-up.”
Besides their partnership Peruke Projects, Sofia and Tanya are also founders of Art World Database, an online resource for Southeast Asian artists. Based in London, they aim to be the industry go-to for all information on art in Southeast Asia, from exhibitions, events and artists.
With a profile feature spotlighting Pio Abad’s nomination as a shortlisted artist this year, Sofia says: “Having the first Southeast Asian artist shortlisted for the award is a significant milestone.”
“In [Abad’s] nominated work this year, what is fascinating is that 90% of Filipino material heritage exists in the storage of Western museums. This type of cultural loss is astonishing and drives home the point even more of how important his nomination is in raising awareness about the lasting impact of colonialism,” Tanya adds.
But this year, Sofia thinks “the firm return to a single prize winner will hopefully also restore the prize’s credibility, after a number of years where all shortlisted artists won, or only collectives were shortlisted,” she said, referencing the four winners in 2019.
This year’s shortlisted artists, with vastly different backgrounds and mediums to express that, bring relevant topics of diaspora and culture to Britain. “The works of the shortlisted artists need to continue reflecting the society where they have been created,” Sofia says.
“At a time when Western colonialism is such a hot topic, and diversity and inclusion are at the forefront of the national agenda, the prize continues to address timely and thought-provoking themes, embracing the notion of a multicultural society, and its significance in building a more tolerant and inclusive Britain.”
With that said Tanya hopes “we will see more equality going forward, not just for this prize, but for any art prize.”
The Turner Prize shortlisted artists are exhibited at Tate Britain, from 25th September to 16th February 2025.
Featured image by Anggi Pande.