Scotland-born Sikh artist Jasleen Kaur has won the coveted 2024 Turner Prize for her solo exhibition ‘Alter Altar’ from the Tramway in Glasgow and currently on display at Tate Britain in London.
One of the prize’s youngest winners aged 38, Kaur bagged the £25,000 honour at a ceremony at Tate Britain this week. The jury congratulated all four nominated artists for each of their eloquent and distinctive presentations, representative of the high standard of British art at this present moment. Working variously with museum objects, sound and installation, personal mythologies and portraiture, the artists this year embed an intimate sense of self, family and community within the circulation of cultures, beliefs and ideas.
They awarded the prize to Jasleen Kaur for her practice of reflecting upon everyday objects, animating them through sound and music to summon community and cultural inheritance. The jury noted the considered way in which the Glasgow-born and London-based artist weaves together the personal, political and spiritual in her exhibition ‘Alter Altar’, choreographing a visual and aural experience that suggests both solidarity and joy. They praised her ability to gather different voices through unexpected and playful combinations of material, from Irn-Bru to family photographs and a vintage Ford Escort, locating moments of resilience and possibility.
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“Something like this that is so visible means a lot to a lot of different people. It means something to different groups and I'm up for representing all of them,” said Kaur, who concluded her speech with a message for peace and ceasefire in the Middle East.
One of the best-known visual arts prizes in the world, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. Established in 1984, the prize is awarded each year to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work.
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This year’s winning exhibition is like an ode to Kaur’s Scottish upbringing, consisting of sculpture, installation, print based work and critically, sound. Sound was embedded into the exhibition by way of worship bells, Sufi Islamic devotional music, harmonium, and pop tracks played via a car stereo, creating a polyphony of references and experiences that reflected the pluralities of religious identities, lineages of community and resistance. A Perspex “sky”, suspended over an oversized Axminster carpet is littered with ephemera from everyday life – a heady mix of personal, political, social and religious histories and iconographies.
