Jasleen Kaur’s Vintage Car Draped in a Doily Wins This Year’s Turner Prize

Jasleen Kaur has won the 2024 Turner Prize for her work reflecting her childhood in Glasgow, including a Ford Escort Cabriolet Mk3 draped in a massive doily titled Sociomobile. At 38 years old, Kaur was the youngest contestant on this year’s shortlist. The judges were impressed by what they described as her “unexpected and playful combinations of material.”

The yearly Turner Prize is the UK’s most prestigious visual arts honor. The winner takes home a £25,000 purse, while shortlisted artists are awarded £10,000. Every other year, the works are presented in an exhibition at London’s Tate Britain (the prize travels around the country in between), and 2024’s show opened on September 25 and runs through 16 February, 2025. 

The headline act of “Alter Altar,” Kaur’s installation at Tate Britain—where the prize returned after being held in Sussex last year—is comprised of the vintage car blasting out a mix of pop, hip-hop, and qawwali devotional music from its speakers. The work also features worship bells and the quintessential Scottish soda, Irn-Bru, to celebrate the Glaswegian Sikh community from which Kaur hails.

Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain’s director, was on the Turner Prize’s jury alongside Rosie Cooper, director of Wysing Arts Centre; Lydia Yee, curator and art historian; Ekow Eshun, writer, broadcaster and curator; and Sam Thorne, director general and CEO at Japan House London. Farquharson said they were impressed by how Kaur  “transforms a whole range of everyday objects, some vernacular and throwaway, into animated environments.”

He added that Kaur’s art “opens up to larger questions of memory, culture and politics that have big historical and geographical co-ordinates in particular the legacy of colonialism.”

British actor James Norton presented the artist with the £25,000 (roughly $30,000) at Tate Britain on Tuesday evening.

Upon accepting the prize, Kaur told the audience that she didn’t know about the Turner Prize growing up because she didn’t have the “cultural access.”

“I have had so many messages today from people from the local Sikh community and from folks that I grew up with,” she said. “Something like this that is so visible means a lot to a lot of different people. It means something to different groups and I’m up of representing all of them.”

Her 2023 exhibition “Alter Altar” at the Tramway in Glasgow was the reason she was nominated for this year’s prize. She recreated the show at the Tate Britain, and it’s been described as a throwback to the Turner Prize’s glory days, when much publicised entries included Damien Hirst’s cow and calf pickled in formaldehyde (1995) and Tracey Emin’s My Bed (1999).

The other shortlisted artists for this year’s prize were Claudette Johnson, Delaine Le Bas, and Pio Abad.