Jasleen Kaur wins the Turner Prize 2024 and calls for the Tate to divest from companies tied to Israel
Jasleen Kaur, winner of the prestigious Turner Prize, used her acceptance speech to call for the Tate to divest from companies with ties to Israel. (Supplied: David Parry)
Jasleen Kaur has won the UK's most prestigious contemporary art award, the Turner Prize, worth 25,000 British pounds ($49,000), for her work focused on the lives and traditions of the Scottish Sikh community.
The 38-year-old installation artist won the award for a British artist or an artist based in Britain, for an exhibition or project from the previous year, for her solo exhibition, Alter Altar, which opened at Tramway in her hometown of Glasgow last year.
The exhibition featured sculptures including bottles of blessed Irn Bru (a Scottish soft drink), salvaged family photos, and a vintage red Ford Escort covered in a 4-metre crocheted doily — paying tribute to her Indian migrant father.
Among the objects in Kaur's exhibition was this red Ford Escort covered in a doily, which references her father's first car and Indian migrants who worked in British textile factories. (Supplied: Tate/Oli Cowling)
Kaur was announced as the winner by actor James Norton (Happy Valley) at Tate Britain in London on December 4, Australian time.
As the announcement was taking place, artists and cultural workers staged a protest outside the Tate Britain, demanding the institution cut ties with organisations linked to Israel, following an open letter last week that was signed by Kaur and a number of shortlisted artists, past winners and judges.
Kaur used her acceptance speech to express solidarity with the protesters outside: "[Divestment is] not a radical demand — this should not risk an artist's career or safety," she said.
"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. 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, arms embargo now. Free Palestine."
Earlier, chair of this year's Turner prize judges Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, said Kaur "Opens up new ways of thinking about British identity through the language of contemporary art".
He described her work as having a "sense of life [which moves] from the specifics of Kaur's own background to big diasporic themes of cross-cultural identity, specifically South Asian and Scottish and, within that, Sikh and secular".
Kaur's exhibition features an acrylic "sky" made up of everyday objects, suspended over an Axminister carpet. (Supplied: Tate/Josh Croll)
Kaur studied silversmithing and jewellery at Glasgow School of Art in 2008, before she moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art.
Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Serpentine Civic in London.
Kaur has described herself as an "an artist making with the slurry of life". She told the Tate earlier this year that the way she makes art is influenced by the stores where her father worked when she was growing up.
"From a young age, knowing that you could make stuff, being surrounded by tools and being surrounded by produced stuff, it's very obvious why I think through objects," Kaur said.
Her work is interested in who gets to write and retell history, and which "things get remembered and which things do not … I'm drawn to things that are hidden, like the intangible bits of history".
The other artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize were Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
The other shortlisted artists, pictured with Kaur (left), are each awarded 10,000 British pounds ($20,000). (Getty Images: Dave Benett)
This year, the Tate celebrates 40 years of the prize. Past winners include artist and 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen, divisive sculptor Anish Kapoor, and Damien Hirst, whose exhibit included his infamous sculpture Mother and Child Divided, a bisected cow and calf in formaldehyde.
The open letter
Kaur and fellow shortlisted artists Abad and Johnson are among more than 1,200 artists and arts workers who signed an open letter last week, calling for the Tate to divest from organisations with ties to Israel due to the ongoing war in Gaza.
2024 prize judges Rosie Cooper and Sam Thorne, last year's winner, Jesse Darling, and other past winners, including Array Collective, Charlotte Prodger and Helen Cammock, also signed the letter.
Kaur is the youngest artist shortlisted this year. From 1991 to 2016, the prize was awarded only to artists under 50, to uplift the work of emerging artists. (Supplied)
Speaking to Dazed last week, Kaur said: "When I accepted the nomination [for the Turner Prize] I also accepted the responsibility of holding the institutions we are choosing to work with to account in various ways — one of those ways is the open letter. I hope Tate listens."
The open letter calls for the UK art institution to, "Take a clear stance against the art-washing of genocide and apartheid" by severing ties with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, the Zabludowicz Art Trust and Zabludowicz Art Projects, including their founders and directors, Candida Gertler and Anita and Poju Zabludowicz.
"We believe Tate has a profound moral duty, if not a legal one, to divest from its affiliations with the Israeli state," the letter reads.
Anita and Poju Zabludowicz are members of the Tate's International Council, a group of "high-level international patrons of the arts". Twenty-one works from the Zabludowicz collection are on long-term loan to the Tate.
Gertler was a member of the council until last week, when she resigned from her role at Outset Contemporary Art Fund and her other voluntary roles at UK arts institutions, describing it as "an act of principled protest against the alarming rise of anti-Semitism".
"I can no longer stand silent when institutions, intimidated by violent and aggressive activism that dismisses dialogue, or any kind of communication fails to uphold the foundational values of equality and respect," she said in a written statement.
Last week, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art said they would be removing the names of Gertler and her husband Zak from one of its galleries and its donor board, following a sustained boycott by students.
This year's judges are Farquharson; arts workers Cooper and Thorne; writer Ekow Eshun; and curator Lydia Yee. (Pictured: Kaur's exhibit in the Turner Prize.) (Supplied: Tate/Josh Croll)
The Tate was yet to respond to the tension playing out between politics and art, referenced in Kaur's speech.
In the meantime, her work — as the prize judges put it — offers up a vision of "how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism, division and social control".
The Turner Prize exhibition is at Tate Britain, London, until February 16.