Jasleen Kaur

Jasleen Kaur’s research reimagines tradition and inherited myths. In Untitled (2023) an automated Indian harmonium – a colonial instrument on which Kaur learned devotional singing from her father – rests upon an image of land restitution in Moga, Panjab where foundations are being ceremonially laid for a mosque to be reconstructed. A series of wall-based resin works Untitled (2023) depict enlarged family photos encased in an orange-tinted resin, reminiscent of the Scottish soft drink Irn-Bru. Torn bits of roti are carefully positioned to obscure the faces of family members, except for the artist’s.

In Alter Altar, Kaur worked with sonic memory and the cultural resonances of everyday materials and objects, presented through a series of installations and kinetic, musical sculptures. Axminster carpet, bottles of blessed Irn Bru, political flyers and photographs were strewn across the gallery to consider how political ideologies are carried and concealed in community spaces.

A series of altered images that Kaur has inherited, from the mass produced to the forgotten. Among them are an iconic image of a Sikh freedom fighter, cartoonish representations of Moghuls, an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana, images of protest and land repatriation in Panjab and a photograph of a late auntie. The act of concealing and revealing through a reassembled or cropped image is a tactic, to direct our attention or withhold information. 

This body of work began with the encounter of a text written by a family member and acted as an instructional guide to healing the body and a point of speculation to missing kin. Kaur explored her relationship to the body; what was latent and carried intergenerationally, and the visceral emotions of grief and ecstatic healing. Works were ingested, transformed by the gut, carried beyond the gallery walls and excreted.

A sculpture and sound-piece located at the mouth of the Thames, opposite Tilbury Dock, responds to the site as the first point of disembarkation for immigrants arriving in the UK, welcomed to rehabilitate post-war Britain. The faux marble render and long, sacred hair reference Gravesend’s histories of community spaces, where marginalised groups provided ‘supplementary schooling’ as a form of resistance. The sound work, made in collaboration with the local Saheli Women’s Group and artist Ain Bailey document the women’s sonic biographies which overlap with the rhythms of the Thames. 

Gut Feelings Meri Jaan was a series of filmed performative acts made with Rochdale residents, responding to the ‘Ethnic Minorities’ section of the local history archives held at Touchstones Museum and Art Gallery. Together they asked: what do we find when we go looking for ourselves in the archive? How can we alter the course of history through a new script?

Performed at local sites bound up in histories of Empire and post-war migration from former colonies, members of the resulting diasporas read and then ate the contents of an archive, washed the statue of an industrialist with handfuls of yoghurt and walked endlessly in the bucolic Lancashire landscape. This collaborative work culminated in a book and a series of films which meddled with traditional archival approaches. What would be gazed at or read becomes digested or buried, bringing the past, present and future of the archive and the power it holds under new scrutiny.

Be Like Teflon was commissioned by Panel for Glasgow Women’s Library. In a collection of conversations between women of Indian heritage living in the UK, themes of labour, duty, sustenance and loss arise. Here we find a place for their herstories.