Jasleen Kaur

Installed along the River Clyde, Glasgow, Superstructure, 2026 is a public artwork commissioned by Glasgow 2026 Festival. Comprising eight wind-activated sculptures, the work explores the river’s complex histories of empire, labour, migration and trade, reflecting on the Clyde’s central role in shaping Glasgow’s industrial and cultural identity. The sculptures respond to the movement of the wind, creating a constantly changing encounter with the landscape and encouraging viewers to consider the forces, people and systems that have shaped the city over time.

The title Superstructure refers to the networks and infrastructures, both physical and social, that support and influence everyday life. Through the relationship between movement, place and memory, Kaur highlights the Clyde as a site of connection, exchange and transformation. Drawing on histories of shipbuilding, global commerce and migration, the work invites reflection on how Glasgow’s past continues to inform its present and how public spaces can hold multiple, overlapping stories.

Kaur’s work explores cultural memory and political belonging. She makes with the slurry of life, interested in the social histories contained within the material things that surround us. In her practice, mass-produced, everyday objects are coded with symbols and images, questioning how the narratives we inherit circulate in discreet ways and, in turn, shape us.

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.

In Kaur’s Untitled series (2023–), enlarged snapshots from the artist’s archive and torn pieces of roti are encased in orange-tinted resin, reminiscent of the Scottish soft drink Irn-Bru. The photographs were taken in Kaur’s home city of Glasgow, and show the artist with family members, whose faces are covered by the roti to retain their privacy. In this image, and others across the series, there is a gesture of being held by hands or amongst bodies and a sense of nostalgia heightened by the sepia glow. These images are a nod to origins but also dis-identifications and the family structure as a place of the artist’s political and feminist education, albeit inadvertently.

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.