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The Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. Each year, a jury shortlists four British artists, or artists based in Britain, for outstanding exhibitions or projects held over the previous year. This year’s artists are Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas.

2024 marks the prize’s 40th anniversary, and its return to Tate Britain for the first time in six years after touring to other cities around the UK. Established in 1984, the Turner Prize is one of the world’s best-known prizes for the visual arts. Contemporary art is now central to the nation’s cultural life, and the Turner Prize has played an important role in that development.

The prize is awarded for an artist’s nominated presentation and their Turner Prize exhibition. This year, the award is broadcast on the BBC on 3 December 2024.

Pio Abad’s artistic practice concerns the personal and political entanglements of objects. Encompassing drawings, paintings, textiles, sculpture and text, his installations surface alternative or repressed historical events and offer counter-narratives.

For the Turner Prize, Abad recreates his exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where he was invited to respond to the collections and archives of Oxford institutions. He presented the objects he found as a critique of how museums collect, display and interpret their collections. The title To Those Sitting in Darkness refers to the unshown museum artefacts sitting in the stores. Abad references a satirical essay by Mark Twain, ‘To the Person Sitting in Darkness’ (1901). This criticised the United States’s conquest of the Philippines, where Abad was born and raised.

Museum objects take on new resonance when displayed alongside Abad’s own drawings, sculptures he made in collaboration with his wife, Frances Wadsworth Jones, and works from the artist’s diasporic community. He says much of the thinking behind the exhibition was staging these encounters. It is a place where the past and the present, history and family come together. He says, ‘a lot of the work happens in that space in between, where the viewer contemplates something that I have produced in response to an artefact that I have looked at.’

Abad has written captions for each object in the exhibition. These bring to light unexamined histories alongside the artist’s response. For Abad, these museum objects are ‘icons of loss, of personal grief, of colonial grief’, containing stories that we must continuously tell. He says, ‘I want the audiences to see how I think, but also, I want them to see themselves in the show.’

Claudette Johnson is noted for her large-scale drawings and paintings, which are often both intimate and monumental. Working with the female figure since the 1980s, she mediates questions about our private and public selves. Johnson aims to give agency to the women represented, mainly out of love for her subjects. In recent years, influenced by her relationship with her sons, her portrayal of young Black men seeks to extend her valorisation to the male figure.

Johnson’s figures invite us into the exhibition space, twisting towards or away, then looking back at us. They often fill the space of the composition or extend beyond the edges of the paper. She says, ‘I find it exciting formally to think about the boundaries that the figure sits within, how they might escape those boundaries.’ In her drawings, the balance between spare, delicate line and areas that are more densely worked creates a sense of the figure as a living presence. It suggests that our identity is not fixed but is created and changeable.

The artist’s works are not necessarily portraits of individual people. Instead, the figures are part of a much bigger story, lifted out of their original context and repositioned. The drawings contain few references – Johnson decontextualises her sitters from a particular moment in time. She thinks of this as a way to signal that ‘Black people have existed in the past, exist now, and will exist in the future, that we belong to all times.’ Her figures take form in the present, embodying what the sociologist Stuart Hall said: ‘The fact is ‘Black’ has never just been there … It has always been an unstable identity, psychically, culturally, and politically … a narrative, a story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found.’

Jasleen Kaur’s installations explore cultural memory and political belonging. Mass-produced, everyday objects are coded with symbols and images. Kaur questions how the narratives we inherit circulate in discreet ways and, in turn, shape us. While family and community are present in Kaur’s work, she is most interested in how these intimacies meet wider sociopolitical structures. Making spaces for us to gather, akin to the vast prayer halls she grew up in, she asks how we can alter what we are devoted to.

For her Turner Prize presentation, Alter Altar, Kaur explores how collective memory is layered in the objects and rituals that surround us. Kaur cuts and pastes objects from her upbringing in Glasgow throughout the gallery to make sense of what is ‘out-of-view’ or withheld. Many of these out-of-view subjects relate to the impacts of imperialism on inherited stories and histories.

Materially, the objects embody histories of assimilation, class and labour. We see a fake Axminster carpet, worship bells and a vintage Ford Escort covered in a four-metre crocheted doily. Above our heads, a suspended ceiling depicts an expansive image of the sky taken in Pollokshields, Glasgow. Cassette tapes, religious iconographies, turmeric - stained nails, a tracksuit, political flyers and stickers are strewn across the heavens. Family photos encased in Irn-Bru coloured resin nod to both identifications and disidentifications. On the floor, found images of protest and restitution, described by Kaur as ‘counter images’, aim to dispel myths around where solidarities lie.

Music resonates through the space. The artist’s voice overlaps with a car sound system blaring devotional Sufi music and popular tracks. These create a polyphony of references to shared devotional practices, lineages and communities of resistance. Gesturing hands chime rhythms. The harmonium, an instrument with colonial roots, relentlessly emits a dissonant hum. Kaur says, ‘I was taught devotional songs on a harmonium, but today, my relationship to singing is not only spiritual but an anti-imperial one.’

Delaine Le Bas’s layered installations interweave paintings, collages, costumes, soundscapes and performances. Her work explores ’un-painting’* her British Roma heritage and stories of her own life as well as feminist mythologies and herstories.

Le Bas has transformed her Turner Prize rooms into an immersive environment, splitting the galleries into corridors and small spaces. The artist uses a variety of materials to offer access points into her art. Organdie, calico and reflective foil cover the walls, floors and ceilings. Painted fabrics and sculptures sit alongside personal items she has remade. Le Bas says, ‘I’m interested in creating different doorways. The fabric is another way of engaging with people because it’s not behind glass … you are physically in the same space as it.’

Le Bas takes us on a journey through a psychic landscape, from chaos to reflection and, ultimately, a transformation. First, we encounter Marley, a hanging ghost inspired by the character created by Charles Dickens. Le Bas asks, ‘How can you make art in chaos and when someone is dying?’ The artist started making the work when her Nan was ill and her family life was in chaos, so it is infused with her memories of this time. A horse, stuffed with hay, is modelled on her Grandfather’s black china horse. The red boots underneath it are enlarged replicas of her first shoes. The horse and the original baby shoes were permanently on display in her Nan’s glass cabinet. Finally, painted footprints lead us to the ancient Greek priestess Pythia. Pythia, who guarded the Oracle at Delphi, asks us to confront and reflect, with the command ‘Know Thyself’.

Le Bas’s Turner Prize presentation is titled Incipit Vita Nova (Thus Begins a New Life). She says that’s what she wants people to take from it: ‘Many people at this moment in time and different parts of this planet … are not in a good place … they are in chaos and it’s terrible … you can be at that really dark place but then you can come out of it.’

*un-painting is a term coined by the radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly to describe a process that the Self must carry out. It is an expression of creativity and hope.

British Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Peoples

Gypsy, Roma (or the gender-sensitive term Rom*nja – the female plural term for Roma is Romnja) and Traveller are terms used in the UK to represent several ethnic groups that share certain common historical and social traits. The principal commonality is their history of nomadism. The umbrella term GRT is used officially by the British Government and Travellers’ rights organisations. The English word ‘Gypsy’ is often used in a demeaning way, but many people in the community use the term proudly.

Le Bas asks, ‘Who puts who in the boxes and who labels the boxes? … Who has the right to call who what? What rights do we have as individuals?’

This year’s shortlisted artists have selected the books and music that are important to them and have informed their work.

Listen to the sounds of the Turner Prize below as selected by the four nominated artists.

You can view the reading lists curated by the four nominated artists below.