Tate Britain 10:00
‘Know thyself’ it says in thick red letters on a wall at this year’s Turner Prize exhibition. Those words, a directive from Ancient Greek priestess Pythia, are a common thread running through all four artists’ work: this is art about the urge, the desperate need, to figure out who you are.
Pio Abad comes first, with a display exploring colonial history, lost narratives of oppression and the role of museums in perpetuating both. Abad spent time in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, diving into the archive and store rooms for hidden stories. Here he combines objects from the collection with his own reactions to them.
There's a bloody, violent watercolour from an 1897 expedition to Benin, a vast drawing of a deer hide, marking the first contact between Native Americans and British colonists, there are recreations of jewellery from the collection of kleptocrats Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, bladed weapons from Mindanao in the Philippines. Taken together, this acts as an archive of centuries of global upheaval, colonial violence and political unrest. But in trying to take in everything from Pocahontas to Benin to Tsarist jewellery to museum collections to contemporary conflicts, it ends up pretty unfocused and unclear, like eight different exhibitions happening at once.
Glasgow-based Jasleen Kaur’s installation is a space for gathering. A huge carpet sits under a false ceiling littered with objects: bottles of Irn Bru, Scottish money, pamphlets for the Indian workers union of Glasgow. Symbols of cultural identity and communal memory.
This is art about the desperate need to figure out who you are
A harmonium on the floor sounds out a pulsating drone, an old Ford Escort under a massive doily blasts hip hop and Qawwali, while photos on the floor show images of protests against immigration raids on the streets of Glasgow. Kaur’s work is a portrait of the innate complexity of British identity, of not fitting in even when this is where you're from, of being as Scottish as Irn Bru even if your name isn’t McAnything. But it’s also Kaur saying the best thing you can probably do is reject all of it, figure out a new path of identity, even if it meets endless resistance.
Chaos comes next in Delaine Le Bas’ hectic installation of splattered paint, mirrored walls and electronic sounds. Sheets hang, splodged with black images of bodies and monkeys and skulls. You journey through a mirrored funeral parlour before emerging into a room of flamingos, demons and figures with coral for arms. ‘Know thyself’, it says on the wall. This is about grief, turmoil and knowing yourself well enough to survive it all.
Final artist Claudette Johnson might be familiar to Londoners after her show at the Courtauld last year. Her work does something simple but effective: it elevates. She paints big, imposing portraits of Black sitters. Bigger than life, they loom, they dominate, they occupy, they take up space. In an art history full of white people, this is ordinary, everyday Black figures being given a place, prominence, importance. Even if I don’t like the execution, I love the power of the idea.
This year’s Turner Prize shortlist is inarguably ladened with contemporary identity politics. Is this what life in the UK in 2024 is like? A constant struggle under the weight of colonialism, imperialism and societal injustice? For lots of people, totally. But in that struggle, these artists are doing something important: they’re making sense of it, they’re knowing themselves.
