Jasleen Kaur calls for an Israel arms embargo while accepting Turner Prize

Last night (December 4), Jasleen Kaur won the 2024 Turner Prize, and used her acceptance speech to make a powerful statement in solidarity with Palestine. 

During the event, protestors were gathered outside London’s Tate Modern to demand that the gallery cut ties with organisations with financial ties to the Israeli state. Last week, Kaur signed an open letter in support of this campaign and as she accepted the prize, wearing a scarf that read ‘DIVEST’ in the colours of the Palestinian flag, she re-iterated her stance.

“I want to echo the calls of protestors outside,” she said. “They have gathered to make visible the demands in the open letter signed by – when I last checked – 1302 signatories in just a week calling for you, Tate, to sever ties with organisations complicit in what the UN and the ICJ are finally getting closer to saying is a genocide of the Palestinian people.”

“This is not a radical demand. This should not risk an artist’s career or safety. We’re trying to build consensus that the ties to these organisations are unethical, just as artists did for Sackler,” she said, referring to the campaign to get art institutions to cut ties with the Sackler family due to its role in the opioid crisis.

“I’ve been wondering why artists are required to dream up liberation in the gallery but when that dream meets life, we are shut down,” she continued. “I want the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practice of politics in life to disappear. I want institutions to understand that if you want us on the inside you need to listen to us on the outside. We needed a ceasefire a very long time ago, we need a proper ceasefire now. We need an arms embargo now. Free Palestine.”

At 38, Kaur was the youngest of the nominees. She was awarded for her exhibition Alter Altar at the Tramway Gallery in Glasgow, which used installations and musical sculptures to explore how political ideologies are carried in community spaces. 

One of the works featured is a Red Ford Mk3 Escort Cabriolet XR3i – a replica of the first car her father owned when he arrived in Scotland – which is draped in a giant doily, referencing the work of Indian migrants in British textile factories. The exhibition repurposed a number of everyday objects, including Irn Bru bottles, political fliers, family photographs and an Axminster carpet.

The Tate Jury praised the timeliness of her work, which they said is  “speaking imaginatively to how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism, division and social control” and the “considered way in which she weaves together the personal, political and spiritual in her exhibition”.