Skip to main content

Jasleen Kaur – Turner Prize nomination

Tate Britain’s announcement in April that Jasleen Kaur (b.1986) has been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize continues Scotland’s relationship with the high profile art award. Kaur appears on the list for the Turner’s 40th year for Alter Altar (2023), the Scottish-Indian artist’s large-scale exhibition at Tramway, Glasgow. Also on the shortlist are Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas. With a £25,000 prize at stake, this year sees the Turner return to Tate Britain for the first time in six years.

 For Alter Altar, Kaur was praised by the Turner judges for an exhibition that channelled her experience of growing up in Pollokshields, the multi-racial area of Glasgow where Tramway is situated. The exhibition used sound, sculpture and pop cultural references across continents to look at colonialism and cultural identity in a deeply personal fashion. Components included family photographs, an Axminster carpet, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells. At the exhibition’s centre was a vintage Ford Escort car covered in a giant doily as it pumped out music by the likes of Bob Marley, N-Trance, Punjabi MC-remixed folksongs, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. 

 

Writing about Alter Altar in ArtReview magazine, Phoebe Cripps pointed out that ‘What holds this show together is a sense of the community as polyvocal. Kaur’s sculpture, photography, sound and writing are threaded throughout with the sense of a lineage – of families and peoples, tied together across continents. She selects everyday objects and materials as cultural witnesses to interwoven communities in Britain…’

 

While Kaur and the other shortlisted artists won’t be talking to the media until the autumn, Turner judge and director of the Cambridgeshire based Wysing Arts Centre Rosie Cooper was quoted in the National newspaper talking about Kaur’s work. Cooper described Kaur’s Ford Escort based piece as a‘representation of her dad’s first car and his migrant desires’ as it ‘blasted snippets of uplifting pop songs referencing freedom and liberation throughout the space.’ The winner of the Prize will be announced at Tate Britain on December 3rd. 


Scottish Art News, Summer 2024

 

ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h
Post a Comment
Read more