Turner Prize nominee Jasleen Kaur on abstracting and alternating contexts
We sit down with Jasleen Kaur ahead of their exhibition at Tate Britain to discuss their practice and inspirations...
August 19, 2024
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
Not new, otherwise (2023) is comprised of found images, ranging from a Sikh freedom fighter, to cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, and images of protest and land repatriation in Punjab. Can you talk about how you source and select these photographs, and your engagement with their ‘original contexts’ through this ongoing series of installations?
I’ve been using images I’ve inherited in various ways, thinking about how their dominance or absence alters your sense of identity and political belonging. Some of these are images I grew up around, they were mass-produced, highly circulated, present in every worship and home space I spent time in. I’m interested in how they’ve become pedagogical tools, what stories they concretise of division or kinship, and the conditions through which they circulated.
Some of the images were more deliberately taken out of circulation at different political moments. For example, I use the image of [Jarnail Singh] Bhindranwale, a Sikh freedom fighter [in post-Independence India]. His image is so iconic, present on posters, t-shirts, and stickers, but fell out of circulation in the early 1990s due to state repression.
I’ve been sitting with more recent images of community solidarity from online news articles in the studio; I am thinking about them in relation to the myth of identities/nationalisms, and trying to re-route or re-root a connection to my lineage through an anti-imperial lens. For me, these images are counter images. They challenge a maintained narrative.
By cropping the original images, you conceal and reveal information, a ‘tactic’ to direct the viewer’s gaze and tell alternative stories. You’ve described all these images as ‘inherited’, whether from memory or mass-produced popular culture; one particular image depicts your late auntie. Does your practice of alteration also serve as a kind of abstraction, a protection of the private, personal, or family histories you place on public display?
Absolutely. It was an instinctive decision to protect the people in the image, made out of care and consent. I’m aware of how images of brown bodies circulate and I’m trying to mediate that. I’m trying to have some agency about how the images are handled once I lose control of them — by concealing, overlapping, or focusing in. Not everything needs to be legible or given over.
In Alter Altar, the images taken from family photographs sit in relation to the images of contemporary land restitution in Moga, Punjab, the recent farmers’ protests in Delhi, or anti-immigration protests in Glasgow. I’m interested in the meeting point between these types of images, where the intimacy of familial structures meets the structure of the state, and how my relationships with these people and places are shaped by wider forces. I’ve always approached making work through a kind of cut-and-paste process — sitting things alongside each other, making these invisible meeting points visible.
You often participate in group exhibitions, most recently, Reluctant Gravities at Hollybush Gardens in London, CLASSifications at Aspex, Portsmouth, and Imagining Otherwise at Primary in Nottingham, where Not new, otherwise (2023) is currently on view. In all of these cases, you have displayed pre-existing work. Does the change in context, or showing work in relation to other artists’ practices, change the meaning of - or your own relationship to - your works?
I’ve really enjoyed the new connections and conversations that have come from re-showing work in the shows you’ve mentioned, especially when space has been made to have dialogue with the other artists. The invitation to show at Primary was also an invitation to have a series of conversations together, to make changes to the show and create a public program. Working with Jala [Wahid] was incredible.
At Primary, your work sits in conversation with Jala Wahid’s sound installation, Naphtha Maqam (2024) which transports listeners across time through the medium of Kurdish maqams, a kind of musical system shared across Central Asia, as discussed on a recent episode of the EMPIRE LINES podcast with Saodat Ismailova. You’ve spoken of being ‘called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony…practicing singing in the sediment’ to the point of intoxication. Are you interested in more direct collaborations in the future, perhaps of a musical nature?
Jala’s use of improvisation of singing traditions to speak to the impact of imperialism really resonated with my work. I also worked with Marged Siôn, a voice practitioner, to produce part of the sound work for Alter Altar. I originally came to singing through the Sikh tradition, but what I heard and sang growing up had been so hugely altered by colonialism and the bordering of India [in 1947] with Partition, communities that once sang together were separated, and oral traditions either died out or changed with new nationalistic agendas.
It was transformative to work with Marged because they come to singing through the Welsh (Cymraeg) language chapel, so we both have a relationship to voice through religion and worship. We worked together over a period of months through somatic exercises to create space in the body to resource sound from. I became really interested in imagining spaces to resource us, as individuals and communities. What you hear is me carrying out these movement-based vocal exercises set to traditional rage scales, multiplied like a chorus. I was interested in improvising with tradition, playing with what you are given.
Similarly, I showed a work at Hollybush Gardens where a Harmonium, a colonial Indian instrument, sits on an image of land restitution in Moga Punjab. The image is enlarged and cropped, and you see a circle of brown hands passing a brick amongst them, to be ceremonially laid for a mosque to be rebuilt. The harmonium is automated and relentlessly lets out a dissonant hum. I wanted to sit these sacred objects and practices alongside this image to rethink what we are worshipping, what we are devoted to.
You were born in Pollokshields, Glasgow, and now live and work in London. Your exhibition in the former at Tramway, Alter Altar (2023), led to your nomination for the 2024 Turner Prize, which runs at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024. Fellow nominee Delaine Le Bas currently has an exhibition at Tramway, one of the largest galleries in Europe with a wide range of audiences; in the words of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, another recent exhibitor, it serves as an ‘alternative town hall’ for the city. Can you describe your ongoing relationship with and between both cities, and their relationships with your practice?
My relationship to Glasgow is complex, and being invited to occupy the space at Tramway, in the neighbourhood I was born in, was indirectly responding to that tension. I remember speaking with my friend and filmmaker Alia Syed, also from Glasgow, who said something like ‘Glasgow has expelled so many of us (women)’. London offered me a home and kinship.
At Tramway, the gallery space was used to convene public and closed groups for the duration of the show. So yeah, it did truly function as a civic space for prayer, voice workshops, reading groups, family activities, often facilitated by local grassroots organisations. I was on maternity leave at the time, so it felt like an opportunity to build on the relationships Tramway already had with the local community, to hand over resources to those groups and to turn the gallery into a space for people to gather. I’d love to be able to facilitate something similar at Tate Britain.
Imagining Otherwise: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid was on view at Primary in Nottingham until 17 August 2024, part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
CLASSifications: Jasleen Kaur, Dinu Li, Jamila Prowse, and Joshua Raffel is on view at Aspex Portsmouth until 13 October 2024.
The Turner Prize 2024 exhibition is on view at Tate Britain in London from 25 September 2024.
Listen and follow the EMPIRE LINES podcast for a conversation with Jasleen Kaur, coming soon.
