Turner Prize 2024, London review: 'the field is wide open'

The writing is on the wall: “Know thyself” shouts the scrawl in Delaine Le Bas’ installation for the 40th Turner Prize. And if there is anything at all in common between the four shortlisted artists, who have wildly different practices, it is to do with knowing themselves, or speaking about the communities of which they are a part.

Back at Tate Britain for the first time in six years, the show is beautifully staged by a curatorial team led by Linsey Young, though the £14 ticket price might deter some visitors. While speculation is rife as to who will carry off the £25,000 prize on 3 December, in reality the field is still wide open.

First up is Pio Abad, born in the Philippines and trained at Glasgow School of Art. His parents were trade union organisers during the Marcos dictatorship and this history informs his practice. He is shortlisted for an exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum which uses his Filipino history as a starting point to explore the troubled stories of museum objects.

The space is hushed, softly lit and museum-like. An astonising 90 per cent of Filipino material heritage is in Western museums, most of it in store rooms, with the most common item being bladed weapons from Mindanao. Abad shows a group of them, against printed cloth from a Filipino textile collective, explaining how they have been misunderstood and, in some cases, misattributed.

This body of work comes from intensive research, and we must read Abad’s detailed labels to learn the stories: for example, that the two replica diadems which he made in collaboration with his wife, jewellery designer Frances Wadsworth Jones, reference a piece which belonged to the Romanovs in pre-Revolution Russia, then to the Duchess of Marlborough, then to Imelda Marcos. Another Marcos gem, a ruby, diamond and pearl bracelet which was part of the $21 million haul confiscated when the Marcoses fled the Philippines in 1986, is remade in concrete on a monumental scale, as imposing as it is worthless.

Then there is the story of “Prince Giolo”, a young tattooed Filipino taken as a slave and brought to England in 1691 where he was exhibited as a curiosity - a kind of living museum piece. He died of smallpox in Oxford and was buried in an unmarked grave. 

Abad, however, does more than tell stories from the past. A superb draughtsman, he maps lost nations as if on the underside of Powhatan’s Mantle, a deerhide garment dating to the time of first contact between native Americans and British colonials. And, having discovered his flat is located in a former Royal Arsenal store where the Benin expedition of 1897 - in which the Benin bronzes were looted - was planned, he made a series of screenprints which pair Benin bronzes with groups of objects from his home, posing questions about how all of us own things with uncomfortable histories. His work stands out for its care, thoughtfulness and skill.

While still in Abad’s space, you can hear the work of the next artist, Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur, who restages her installation Alter Altar which was at Tramway in Glasgow in the spring. It feels more comfortable here, when it hasn’t been forced to expand to fit a space the size of an aircraft hangar. 

It’s a densely layered show: an immense fake Axminister carpet below, a perspex ceiling above on which found objects float: bottles of Irn Bru, CDs of Sufi music, political pamphlets, lottery tickets, Scottish pound notes. There are enlarged photographs on the floor too: Sikhs and Muslims praying together; the residents of Pollokshields surrounding an immigration enforcement van in 2021 to prevent the arrest of two of their neighbours.

The sound is also layered: Kaur’s own unaccompanied singing; tinkling worship bells dangling from the fingers of huge mechanised hands; the drone of an automated harmonica; and the pièce de résistance, a replica of her father’s Red Ford Mk 3 Escort Cabriolet, draped with a giant lace doily, blaring out a mix of pop, hip-hop and qawwali music. 

It’s a kind of personal portrait of multicultural Britain, imbued with the concern (I think) that cultures have become less tolerant of one another as diversity has increased. But the meanings with which the individual elements are invested are so specific to Kaur herself they are mostly unavailable to the viewer. One can only guess at how they fit together to make a bigger picture.

Delaine La Bas followed Kaur at Tramway with a gargantuan exhibition during the Glasgow International festival. Her work here, which was at Secession in Vienna, is smaller in scale, more focussed and also stranger. While it’s invested with the same manic energy of Le Bas’ immersive “gipsy-hippy-punk” aesthetic, it lacks the impact of the Tramway show’s scale.

We travel through three spaces. “Chaos” is a picture of disorder: the walls hung with organdie, painted with scrawly figures of women and monkeys. There are slogans and monsters, a stitched child’s toy. In the next room, “Reflection”, walls, ceiling and floor are covered with reflective foil. A cloth horse slumps in a corner; there is a flickering stream-of-consciousness film. In the last space, “Ascension”, we’re transported to the Oracle at Delphi, surrounded by human-animal hybrids and goddess figures. Each space has its own soundtrack. 

It is - as far as I can work out - a journey through grief, drawing on Le Bas’ Roma background, and on stories and mythology, and is ultimately positive: the title is Incipit Vita Nova (Thus Begins A New Life). It’s feverish, instinctive, maximalist. Ultimately, though, it left me both over-stimulated and a little bit confused.

It was something of a relief to emerge into Claudette Johnson’s space, a traditional exhibition of portraits (although she takes some issue with the word). Her subjects are Black women, and occasionally men, realised on a large-scale. She works with a mix of paint, oil pastel, oil stick and charcoal and prefers the term “drawings” to “paintings”. 

Conceptually, it’s beautifully simple: she depicts ambitiously and at scale ordinary Black people who are rarely represented in museums and galleries. The fact of the work’s presence here (and recently in other major institutions, including the Courtauld) means it’s doing what it set out to do. Johnson was a member of the Black Art Group in the 1980s and there’s a sense in which her Turner nomination recognises a lifetime of achievement.

They are marvellous works, though. The woman in Figure in Raw Umber looks back over her shoulder at the viewer, half-surprised, half-annoyed, indisputably alive. The subject of Reclining Figure is beautifully realised, her tired face lovingly detailed, her body evoked in just a few lines.

Central to the show is Piéta, a Black woman holding her dead son, heartbreakingly young and fragile. It is painted on bark cloth. One thinks, immediately, of George Floyd, of so many young Black men who lose their lives to violence. The religious imagery imbues it with dignity and pathos. Scratched into the paint around the figures are the words: “Every mother was called when he called for his mother.”

Johnson’s seriousness, dignity and evident skill have stayed with me, as has the rigour and elegance of Abad’s work. Kaur’s work is ambitious, Le Bas’ has passionate energy. All four have acquitted themselves well, but Turner Prizes are notoriously hard to call. Roll on 3 December, and may the best man or woman win.

Until 16 February. The winner of the Turner Prize 2024 will be announced on 3 December, see www.tate.org.uk