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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

 

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