The Brooklyn Rail

Upon entering the first room of the Turner Prize exhibition—the yearly showcase that since 1984 has highlighted the work of four British artists, each nominated for a notable exhibition within the past year—the viewer is met with a wholly alien object. Made of grey concrete and measuring around three meters in length, it takes most of the floorspace right by the entrance and at first glance looks like a model of a futuristic architecture, half Italian cupola, half science-fictional military outpost.

Explanation comes with the accompanying caption: Kiss The Hand You Cannot Bite (2019) is not a fantasy of a medusa-like spaceship but rather a magnified rendering of a thirty-carat ruby, diamond, and pearl bracelet owned by Imelda Marcos, who—together with her husband, dictator Ferdinand Marcos—terrorised the Philippines for over twenty years. As it turns out, the bracelet was part of a hoard of jewellery worth more than twenty million dollars that the couple embezzled when offered sanctuary in Hawaii by Ronald Reagan. It has been an object of fascination for Filipino-born British artist Pio Abad, whose grandfather was a leader of the opposition and whose parents were trade unionists likewise opposed to the regime.

All around are similarly cryptic objects or artefacts, whose meaning and underlying affinities are only clarified in the accompanying text. There are bits of the archive at the Ashmolean Museum that Abad’s original show, To Those Sitting in Darkness, was a response to, like John Savage’s Prince Giolo (1692), the etching of a Philippine villager who, after being sold into slavery to explorer William Dapier, was then paraded as a curiosity in London, only to die of smallpox soon after. And there are Abad’s artworks proper, such as Giolo’s Lament (2023), a series of eleven engravings on marble that directly respond to the etching. We find also I am singing a song that can only be borne after losing a country (2023), a drawing of the reverse of “Powhatan’s Mantle,” a ceremonial deer hide skin that Chief Powhatan gave the British settlers when they first landed in Virginia, also from the Ashmolean Museum.

A similar quality of estrangement—the slightly nervy feeling that one cannot be sure what one is looking at—continues in the two rooms that follow.

Jasleen Kaur’s installation, which revisits her show Alter Altar in Glasgow, is a bricolage of found objects, sculptures, family photographs, and soundscapes which, all together, speak to her unique upbringing and sense of identity as a person of mixed Sikh heritage growing up in Glasgow. On the right, an Indian harmonium plays a dissonant drone while sitting atop an oversized, pixelated image of Southeast Asian men (the photograph was taken in Punjab and depicts land repatriation between Sikh and Muslim neighbours). An enormous Axminster-style carpet invites the viewer to take in Begampura (2023), a large-scale suspended ceiling printed with an image of sky in Pollock Park, Glasgow littered with lots of found and altered objects of diverse provenance. Nearby, Sociomobile (2023), a vintage Ford escort draped with a doily, blasts a mix of pop songs and devotional hymns.

The effect is that of a sui generis worship hall or personal altar, but because the objects are made to collide in a haphazard way, the exploration of themes the show addresses remains somewhat underdeveloped.

Incipit Vita Nova [Here Begins The New Life], the installation by Delaine Le Bas originally on view at Secession, Vienna, likewise invites the viewer to immerse themselves in an utterly bizarre alternate reality that both speaks to the artist’s British-Roma heritage and her ultra-personal aesthetic. The exhibition charts a path from grief to rejuvenation, from death to rebirth. However, because there is no Virgil to guide us through the journey from abyss to heavens, the impression is that of an empty theater stage, waiting for the performer to make it come to life.

The figurative portraits of Black people by Claudette Johnson—a summation of work shown at The Courtauld Gallery and Ortuzar Projects—by contrast are quite legible (maybe a tad too much). The centre stage is taken by Pietà (2024), a painting that’s been shown for the first time and that portrays a mother holding her son’s lifeless body. However, my personal favourite was Reclining Figure (2017), which depicts a Black woman (perhaps a maid) at rest. These two works, like the rest of the works on show, are best to be admired very close up, so as to reveal the use of different media and the artist’s pentimenti.

There is no doubt which showcase I connected with the most. British art critics nostalgic for the good old days of Cool Britannia and the provocations of the Young British Artists have already excoriated the show as too tame or politically correct. One of these calls Pio Amad’s approach “antiquarian.” Personally, I was blown away by the painstaking craft evident in 1897.76.36.18.6 (2023), a series of ink drawings juxtaposing Benin bronzes infamously conserved at the British Museum with household objects from Abad’s own house. (To me, they looked almost like Vanitas). But beyond its obvious aesthetic merits, Abad’s craft is anything but “antiquarian.” Rather, it’s “genealogical,” in the Nietzschean sense of the word. He rescues artefacts and histories languishing in the archives and closets of museums and connects them as dots in one planetary history of (mostly British) imperialism, all the while producing exquisite and yet strange objects of his own. (He often collaborates with his wife, jewellery designer Frances Wadsworth Jones.)

The least you can do as a beneficiary of the spoils of such a horrific system is to read the captions.