I wanted Jasleen Kaur to win as soon as I’d seen this year’s prize show. Her work made me come back again, and simply to be there on her gigantic synthetic Axminster carpet.
Kaur invites our curiosity. Pio Abad’s work, mostly made during a residency at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, is similarly rich with detail and stories, but felt illustrational, overdependent on the explanatory wall labels. Delaine Le Bas’s textile hangings and tents and impromptu drawings, with their skulking figures, their animals and printed footsteps on the floor, ended up too winsome to take seriously.
Whatever her references to Romani culture and her ‘gypsy-hippy-punk’ aesthetic of excess, and her exhortations to ‘Know thyself’, I just couldn’t go there.
I thought Claudette Johnson might well win for her large-scale pastel portraits, but she is already, if belatedly, acknowledged as a senior artist, and held a show at the Courtauld Gallery earlier this year. However accomplished Johnson’s pastel portraits are, her work feels very conventional. Paradoxically, there’s not enough life in them.
A wheezy mechanical harmonium plays and we hear the artist singing, sometimes drowned out by blaring music from a Ford Escort, draped in a giant doily.
How welcoming Kaur’s installation is. The carpet is an invitation to sit and linger, for the eye and the mind to rove. The translucent false ceiling above is like Glasgow’s changeable sky. Instead of clouds, objects swim above us, a litter of memories along with the rubbish. Being here is like drifting through the afternoon in an unfamiliar city park. Who knows what might pass by and claim our attention.
We are very much in the city where Kaur grew up, and references to childhood, family life, her community and background keep surfacing. There go the plastic Irn Bru bottles, a mislaid scarf, a cassette player and tapes of devotional qawwali music by the great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
There are balloons and tinsel and Scottish pound notes and who knows what else up there. A wheezy mechanical harmonium plays and we hear the artist singing, sometimes drowned out by blaring music from a Ford Escort, draped in a giant doily, parked in a distant corner of the room.
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The longer you stay the more there is to attend to. Kaur’s work here is filled with interruptions, asides, references, stories told and untold. Everything brings with it the texture of life in a time and place, with all its randomness and particularity.
Below the ceiling, found photographs depict Sikhs and Muslims standing in solidarity, and protesters surrounding an immigration enforcement van in Pollokshields, Glasgow, the area where Kaur grew up.
The personal collides with larger stories of migration and colonialism, and the background of Indian partition. Pleasure and the political, the personal and the communal come together in this affecting installation. Kaur’s deft, humorous touch makes her work all the more engaging. It feels like an intimate conversation with a stranger.