Jasleen Kaur ’s red Ford Escort , standing in the gallery and covered by a giant cotton doily, its sound system blasting out snatches of pop and hip-hop and qawwali devotional song will surely be the laugh-out-loud totemic image of this year’s Turner prize show at Tate Britain. It is but one of several arresting moments, in a show filled with cultural collisions, shifts in register and wildly divergent intentions. Business as usual, then.
It’s raining ink. It’s erupting in hearts and skulls and human faces, and in a menagerie of human hares, tree-people and coral in Delaine Le Bas ’s labyrinthine installation. Blood-red footprints cross the gallery floor.
A can-can of naked legs, a bulbous paper dragonfly, a galumphing sad-sack horse fashioned from organdie stuffed with hay and feathers are among the profusion of ideas and images. Figures loom in hanging, translucent cotton tents and there are mythological and magical signs and portents everywhere in Le Bas’s work. I haven’t a clue what all the furniture and embroidery and the nature symbolism means (I’m pretty immune to that sort of thing) but Le Bas’s installation, recreating her 2023 show at Secession in Vienna , is full of vitality and surprise, witches and devils, silliness and verve.
What Le Bas calls her “ Gypsy-hippy-punk ” aesthetic, and her Roma-Traveller background are the motors of her art. All artists have a story to tell and in this year’s Turner prize tales of origin and arrival are cruc.
