The political eclipses the personal in Jasleen Kaur’s Turner Prize win

Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur has won the 2024 Turner Prize – the annual British art-world honour bestowed by the Tate Gallery – for her solo exhibition, Alter Altar, which was shown last year at the Tramway in Glasgow, her home city.

Kaur’s prize-winning installation explores her childhood and the Scottish Sikh community in which she grew up, relating that experience to broader social and political narratives around nationalism, post-colonialism, working-class culture and gender roles.

According to Kaur, Alter Altar explores “improvisation and political mysticism as tools to reimagine tradition and inherited myths”. Restaged in Tate Britain’s London galleries, the exhibition – like much of her work – incorporates sculpture, found everyday objects, video, photography (some appropriated from archival sources) and sound. The show has been immensely popular with both the public and art critics alike.

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Kaur has transformed the galleries in London’s Pimlico. Centre stage is a 1980s bright red Ford Escort draped in an enormous crocheted doily which blurts out a fractured soundtrack of the artist singing along to a mechanical harmonium. An enormous synthetic patterned rug and kinetic musical sculptures decked with golden worship bells are accompanied by salvaged family photographs, enlarged and printed in Irn Bru-coloured orange, depicting moments from Kaur’s childhood alongside political flyers.

Alex Farquhar, director of Tate Britain, praised the way 38-year-old artist “weaves together the personal, political and spiritual”. But in her acceptance speech at the awards ceremony, which took place at the Tate Britain on December 3, Kaur pointedly went beyond bridging the personal and political in an appeal which has now attracted a huge amount of media and social media attention.

She used the opportunity to speak to the current crisis taking place in Gaza. During the awards evening, around 100 activists had gathered on the steps of Tate Britain to listen to speeches demanding that the Tate sever ties with organisations they claim are complicit with the current occupation and destruction of Gaza.

Kaur stated: “From where I am now, I want to echo the calls of the protesters outside. A protest made up of artists, culture workers, Tate staff and students who I stand firmly with. They’ve gathered to make visible the demands of the open letter signed by, when I last checked, 1,310 signatories in just a week.”

The letter to which Kaur referred called for the Tate to sever ties with organisations complicit in what she said, “the UN and ICJ [International Court of Justice] are finally getting closer to saying is a genocide of the Palestinian people”.

For the past year, artists around the world speaking out against the Israeli military occupation and destruction of Gaza have been subjected to what many see as a disturbing wave of cultural censorship within the contemporary art world. This has put in doubt the very freedom of speech that should define the cultural and public sphere, and has led to artists – including Palestinian, pro-Palestinian Israelis, Jewish and non-Jewish figures – being deplatformed, silenced and cancelled, about which I have written at length.

Referring to this context Kaur stated, “This is not a radical demand, this should not risk an artist’s career or safety. We’re trying to build consensus that the ties to these organisations are unethical.”

The themes in Kaur’s work have resonated with museum programming since 2013, when the global Black Lives Matter social movement began to shift popular debates and cultural programming around the need to urgently decolonise cultural institutions, their collections and curatorial practice.

Yet many artists have queried why it is that politics are acceptable in relation to some social injustices and colonial violence, but not others. And why it is artists, and not the museums and cultural spaces which support them, who are forced to take these political stances.

The artist Hannah Black has spoken out compellingly about this situation which is also, of course, a result of the different ideological tensions between artists, collectors and trustees as well as the increase in corporate and private sources of funding and the depoliticisation of the cultural sphere.

Kaur’s speech concluded: “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 that if you want us inside, you need to listen to us outside.”

Kaur’s protest echoes photographer Nan Goldin’s recent speech at the opening of her exhibition in Berlin in which she spoke out against the ongoing displacement and devastation in Gaza, emphasising that criticism of Israel should not be equated with antisemitism.

As Kaur’s Turner Prize win demonstrates, artists are increasingly finding high-profile spaces to change the conversations and media coverage of the situation in Gaza. For me, if Kaur’s moment can reach beyond the mainstream – demanding a ceasefire now and calling for divestment in Israel – then perhaps the Turner Prize has momentarily rediscovered its significance in shifting the terms of public debate.