Jasleen Kaur, an artist whose recent installation work focuses on her childhood growing up in a Sikh community in Scotland, on Tuesday won the Turner Prize, the prestigious British art award.
The announcement was preceded by a small but noisy pro-Palestinian protest outside Tate Britain, the art museum in London where the prize ceremony took place.
As the award dinner began, about 100 activists gathered at Tate Britain’s steps and listened to speeches demanding that the Tate group of museums end any association with Israel, including the high-profile donors Anita and Poju Zabludowicz. In a protest letter published online, the activists said the Zabludowiczes have “well-documented economic and ideological links” to Israel’s government through the Tamares Group, the family’s real estate investment business.
The letter’s signatories included Kaur and two of the other artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, Claudette Johnson and Pio Abad.
While accepting the award onstage, Kaur, draped in a scarf in Palestinian colors, said she supported the protesters and called for Tate to end ties with Israel. “It’s not a radical demand — this should not risk an artist’s career or safety,” she said.
She then said “Free Palestine” to cheers.
Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner Prize jury, said before the ceremony that he would not comment on the protesters or their demands and that he just wanted to focus on Kaur’s art.
The Zabludowiczes also turned down an interview request. In a statement published on their website last year, the couple said they were “deeply saddened and troubled by the horrific war that is unfolding in Israel and Gaza” and that they “strongly support a two-state solution.”
The protesters had also demanded in their letter that Tate cut ties with Candida Gertler, a donor who they said had “problematic ties” to the Israeli state. Gertler, who is Jewish, resigned from all her positions at British museums, including Tate, and said in a lengthy statement that the protests were part of an “alarming rise of antisemitism” that museums were allowing to occur unchallenged.
The protests surrounding the Turner Prize announcement on Tuesday were the latest example of the art world’s struggles to manage the polarized views around Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon. Since the Hamas attacks in October 2023, many artists have signed letters calling Israel’s retaliation in Gaza a genocide, while Jewish and Israeli donors have often felt threatened by the level of vitriol directed toward them.
Kaur, 38, was born in Glasgow, and grew up in the city’s Sikh community. She studied silversmithing and jewelry at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. She has mainly displayed work in group shows but was nominated for the exhibition “Alter Altar” — which featured items related to her upbringing as well as music playing out of a car stereo and a mechanically operated harmonium — at the Tramway arts venue in Glasgow.
Farquharson, the jury chair, said Kaur “creates environments out of often very throwaway items” that when put together speak to much larger personal, political and spiritual issues. Her work, some of which is in an exhibition at Tate Britain that is open through Feb. 16, is as irreverent as it is reverent, Farquharson said.
The Turner Prize was founded in 1984 and is one of the art world’s major awards. Several of its past winners, who have included Wolfgang Tillmans, Steve McQueen and Lubaina Himid, have gone on to become stars. Critics almost unanimously praised last year’s choice of Jesse Darling for the prize, breaking a lengthy period in which they chastised the judges for seemingly prioritizing an artist’s political views above talent.
The other three nominees for this year’s award were Claudette Johnson, whose portraits of Black people in pastels and watercolor grace major collections in Britain and the United States; Pio Abad, a Filipino artist whose work includes sculptures of jewelry that Imelda Marcos once stole from his country; and Delaine Le Bas, an artist of Romany heritage who makes vibrant installations and paintings.
British critics were split over who should win this year’s prize, but some had made the case for Kaur, who will receive 25,000 pounds, or about $31,700, in prize money.
Alastair Sooke, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said that Kaur’s art brought “a little energy and effervescence” to an otherwise conventional and uptight list of nominees. Adriane Searle, in The Guardian, praised Kaur’s cloth-covered car as the “laugh-out-loud totemic image of this year’s Turner Prize” and said her installation was “filled with texture and humor and complexity.”
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