Jasleen Kaur has won the coveted 2024 Turner Prize with a vibrantly eclectic installation that showcases the Scottish Sikh community. Everyday personal objects collide with highly charged political images in her installation at London’s Tate Britain, amongst them a giant doily draped over a vintage Ford Escort.

“Something like this that is so visible means a lot to a lot of different people,” said the artist in her winner’s speech. “It means something to different groups and I’m up for representing all of them“.

Kaur, who grew up in Glasgow, filled the exhibition room with stories from an existing show called Alter Altar. The 38-year-old layered the sound of herself singing with an automated harmonium, worship bells, and the intermittent music blaring from the Ford.

References to her childhood and Sikh background are suspended on a false ceiling, including plastic Irn-Bru bottles, a mislaid scarf, a cassette player and tapes of Qawwali music, balloons, tinsel, and Scottish pound notes. “It is this heavenly, liberated space, but it’s also full of detritus,” explained Kaur. Below is a vast Axminster carpet and an altar-like table, covered in sculptures of devotional hand gestures.

Photographs are displayed around the room of Kaur’s family, as well as images of Sikhs and Muslims standing in solidarity, and protesters surrounding an immigration enforcement van in Pollokshields, Glasgow. Turner Prize judges commended the artist’s ability to “gather different voices through unexpected and playful combinations of material“.

Born in 1986, Kaur studied silversmithing and jewellery at Glasgow School of Art in 2008 before moving to London to study at the Royal College of Art the following year. Her work examines the cultural resonances of everyday materials and objects and has been previously exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The actor James Norton presented Kaur with the £25,000 prize at Tate Britain on Tuesday evening. During her acceptance speech, she called for a ceasefire in the Middle East and voiced her support for the protestors gathering outside the venue as the ceremony unfolded. 

“I wanted Jasleen Kaur to win as soon as I’d seen this year’s prize show,” wrote the Guardian journalist Adrian Searle. “Her work made me come back again.”

All four nominated artists were praised by the jury for their “eloquent and distinctive presentations”, which they said were “representative of the high standard of British art at this present moment”. They included Pio Abad, Delaine Le Bas, and Claudette Johnson.