Glasgow artist Jasleen Kaur wins 2024 Turner Prize

While picking up the UK’s biggest arts prize for her solo exhibition Alter Altar, Jasleen Kaur spoke out for Palestinian people and urged arts institutions to listen to artists’ calls for an immediate ceasefire

Article by Jamie Dunn | 04 Dec 2024
  • Jasleen Kaur's Alter Altar, Tramway, Glasgow, 2023

Glasgow artist Jasleen Kaur has won the 2024 Turner Prize. Picking up her award last night at a ceremony at Tate Britain in London, she used her platform to make a rousing and passionate stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and to call out the hypocrisy and complicity of the arts institutions – including the Tate – that are reluctant to call for an immediate arms embargo and ceasefire.

“I’ve been wondering why artists are required to dream up liberation in the gallery, but when that dream meets life, we're shut down,” said Kaur, who took the stage wearing a huge Palestinian scarf. “I want the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practice of politics in life to disappear. I want the institutions to understand that if you want us inside [your galleries], you need to listen to us outside.”

She ended her blistering speech with: “Ceasefire now! Arms embargo now! Free Palestine!”

Portrait photo of Jasleen Kaur, sat on a chair in front of a blue wall.
Jasleen Kaur. Photo courtesy of artist

Kaur won the Turner Prize for her exhibition Alter Altar, which ran at Tramway in Glasgow last year, not far from where Kaur grew up in Pollokshields. Blending the personal and the political, the exhibition celebrated Scotland's South Asian community and told Kaur’s story of growing up in a Sikh family in Glasgow’s Southside. Among the most memorable pieces in the exhibition was a replica of Kaur’s dad’s first car from when he arrived in the UK – an old Red Ford Escort cabriolet – which she’d draped in a massive hand-crocheted doily.

Kaur’s speech is echoed in the December issue of The Skinny by artist Hussein Mitha, who’s written a powerful piece on the growing discontent between Scottish artists and Scottish organisations over their response to the genocide in Palestine. “Many cultural institutions who have long ridden the 'decolonial' wave and projected an image of 'progressive', anti-racist, socially-engaged commitments, found themselves structurally silent, complicit and lacking in solidarity when it came to the colonial genocide of Palestinians,” writes Mitha. “Many of them who protested on social media about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had nothing to say about the daily massacre of Palestinians, enabled by the UK and Scottish governments.”

Watch Kaur's acceptance speech in full here, and pick up the December issue of The Skinny to read Mitha’s opinion piece, A Rift in the Scottish Arts.