“Turner Prize 2024” at Tate Britain
The Turner Prize is quieter these days. Its electric heyday during the ’90s, when artists like Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, and Rachel Whiteread won, is certainly over. Today, its relevance is being questioned, and for good reason. The prize’s significance and competitive nature were seriously interrogated in 2019, when the four shortlisted artists asked to share the spoils—and the jury agreed. While the Turner Prize has long drawn headlines for the shocking work on view, lately those headlines have focused on everything but the art, like the artists sharing the Prize or artist Tai Shani sporting a “Tories Out” necklace to the 2019 ceremony. I yearn for a return to art on view doing the speaking.
This year, artists Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, and Delaine Le Bas are striving to ramp up the volume and drag the Turner from mediocrity back to the center of the avant-garde. The winner, chosen based on the shortlisted artists’ works now on view at Tate Britain, will be announced on December 3.
Reflecting on her experience growing up in Glasgow in a South Asian family, Kaur offers a red Ford Escort draped in an oversize cotton doily as the car’s speakers blare a mixture of hip-hop, pop, and Islamic devotional chanting. It feels like the most Turner Prize–esque of this year’s entries, and she’s my pick to take home the prize.
Johnson’s unfinished portraits in pastel, oil stick, and gouache are moving enough, but they’re nothing we haven’t seen before, especially given how important she has been to British artistic history. That she wasn’t nominated sooner is shame. Le Bas’s installation delves into her Roma roots, while Abad’s weighty, dense drawings, etchings, and sculptures unpack cultural loss and colonial histories of the Philippines. The rest of these entries are all a bit underwhelming, like the current iteration of the prize itself.
