In early December, Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur will learn if she has won the 2024 Turner Prize, an award given to a British artist who has created an outstanding exhibition of their work. If victorious, she’ll join a lineage of groundbreaking artists (including Chris Ofili, Gillian Wearing and Lubaina Himid) who are predicted to shape the direction of contemporary art.

Known for her exploration of identity, migration and historical narratives, Kaur caught the Turner Prize jury’s attention with her 2023 solo show at Tramway. Titled Alter Altar, the exhibition reimagines tradition through a series of installations and kinetic, sonic sculptures. Created with objects full of cultural and personal resonance (like litre bottles of Irn-Bru, a football scarf and family photographs), Kaur looks to the everyday to find new meaning in old myths and customs. Perhaps her best-known work, ‘Sociomobile’ (on display at Alter Altar), is a sonically enhanced Ford Escort covered in a giant crocheted doily, linking her dad’s first car to ‘his migrant desires’ through the tactile nature of cotton and its complex ties to the legacies of Empire.

‘Growing nationalism and populism are making anti-imperial histories feel more urgent,’ Kaur reflects in the days following Trump’s re-election. It’s in this increasingly divisive political moment that the press, public and judges can encounter Alter Altar for a second time, re-staged as part of the 2024 Turner Prize showcase at Tate Britain in London, the city where Kaur has lived since a child and where she has found a sense of community.

This period is personally intense for Kaur as well, as she returns from maternity leave after the birth of her second child. ‘Going through the Turner Prize process is so different from watching it from the outside,’ she admits. ‘There’s a difference between the private and public perception that’s hard to square.’ When asked what’s next, Kaur states that her studio work is on pause for now; she’s reading lots of ‘trippy, dystopian fiction’ that mirrors real life, by authors such as Isabel Waidner, while also working on a new kinetic public sculpture for Thamesmead, a project that will draw directly from materials and histories of the local area. Turner Prize winner or not, there’s a sense that Jasleen Kaur’s practice will always be deeply rooted in community.

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Main picture: Robin Christian.