Indian-origin artist wins Turner Prize: ‘Weaves personal, political, spiritual’

It featured, among others, a vintage red Ford Escort covered with a huge crocheted doily, a reference to her father’s migrant aspirations, worship bells, Irn-Bru orange resin, an Axminster carpet, and family photographs. Also playing were soundtracks that were part of Kaur’s growing up years, from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Bob Marley.

In several interviews, Kaur has often discussed her multicultural upbringing and influences. If her 2021 series, “Gut Feelings Meri Jaan”, explored ideas around inheritance and belonging, history and archive, in the 2018 “I Keep Telling Them These Stories”, she used archival footage and recordings gathered from India and Scotland to explore culture as praxis, family, identity and origins. Her 2019 publication, “Be Like Teflon”, commissioned by Panel for Glasgow Women’s Library, comprises conversations between Kaur and women of Indian heritage living in the UK.

Her website describes her as: “An artist making with the slurry of life. Raised amidst betrayal, secrecy and banished outsiders, her work is to make sense of what is out of view or withheld. She is called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony, the blur. She is practising singing in the sediment till she is intoxicated.”