Jasleen Kaur | 流动身份下的符号转译
Jasleen Kaur | Translating Symbols within Fluid Identities
Writer: Iris Hsu
Date: 30/11/2024
Keywords: identity / memory / narrative
Date: 30/11/2024
Keywords: identity / memory / narrative
Jasleen Kaur (b. 1986) graduated in 2008 from the Glasgow School of Art with a degree in Silversmithing and Jewellery, and in 2010 completed an MA in Applied Arts at the Royal College of Art, London. She is currently based in London. Raised within a Sikh community in Glasgow, Kaur grew up surrounded by narratives of betrayal, secrecy, and marginalization within dominant social structures. Her practice primarily takes the form of installation using found objects and mixed media, frequently addressing themes rooted in her Indian heritage and Sikh faith. By assembling fragments of everyday life and recontextualizing ordinary objects, she generates new symbolic meanings through which to examine cultural inheritance and complex formations of identity. Her work articulates a state of hybridity—ambiguous, layered, polyphonic, and resistant to categorization. Kaur has exhibited at institutions including Tramway, Glasgow (2023); Touchstones Rochdale (2021); the Wellcome Collection, London (2021); and the Serpentine Galleries, London (2020). She received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2024.
Alter Altar, Tramway, Glasgow, 2023
Jasleen Kaur的作品是一场关于身份与记忆的深层对话，通过日常物件与声音装置，她解构了传统叙事框架，以非线性的方式重新组织文化和历史。在她的创作中，个体经验与集体历史交织，传统与现代交错，既充满张力，又充满诗意。她的艺术实践在挑战既定的视觉与文化符号时，也打开了一条对话的路径，质疑那些被隐藏或被规范化的历史。
对于最初学习金属工艺与珠宝的Jasleen Kaur而言，物质（material）和制作是创作的核心。她认为，生活中被忽视的物品往往见证了社会与文化的变迁，既是其注脚，也可以成为其视觉象征。她通过对这些物件的拆解与重组，反映出现实的样貌。在她早期的作品 父亲的鞋（Father’s Shoes，2009年）中，她将皮鞋和人字拖结合在一起，表现其父亲身为生意人却常常穿着随性的特点。
Kaur’s practice constitutes a sustained inquiry into identity and memory, dismantling linear narrative structures through the orchestration of everyday objects and sound. Individual experience and collective history intertwine within her installations, where tradition and modernity coexist in tension. Her work challenges stabilized visual and cultural codes, opening discursive space for histories that have been suppressed or normalized into invisibility.
Trained initially in silversmithing and jewellery, Kaur maintains a deep commitment to materiality and making. She approaches overlooked objects as witnesses to social and cultural transformation—marginal artifacts that function simultaneously as annotations and symbols of lived experience. In her early work Father’s Shoes (2009), she fused leather dress shoes with flip-flops, reflecting on her father’s dual identity as a businessman whose sartorial formality coexisted with informal habits. Through such gestures of recombination, she renders visible the layered realities embedded within material culture.
Jasleen Kaur, Fathers Shoes, 2009
Kaur的作品深刻地反映了移民身份的流动性与复杂性。她利用看似普通的日常物件，通过重新组合与文化编码，赋予它们全新的意义。艺术家认为个人私有物品在身份塑造过程中有很强的的重要性。2017年，她在伯明翰的Eastside Projects展出作品 五个K（The Five K’s）。这件作品由五张大型阿克明斯特地毯（Axminster carpet）组成，这种地毯常见于英国的南亚裔家庭，锡克教徒也经常在聚会中坐在地毯上共同用餐。地毯的造型设计来源于锡克教徒随身携带的五件物品：Kesh（头发）、Kanga（梳子）、Kirpan（剑）、Kara（手镯）和Kachera（内衣），这也是作品名称中“五个K”的由来。英国风格与印度文化在这件作品中交织，通过物质表达了移民族群复杂的身份认同。
在Eastside Projects的展览“Artists House”中，Jasleen Kaur延续了她自RCA时期开始的兴趣——食物。她将食物视为干扰白盒子空间（white cube）的方式，并逐渐通过烹饪实践将沟通、关怀与社区经营融入艺廊。五个K也是集体烹饪与用餐活动的一部分，观众来到艺术空间，坐在这五张地毯上享用美食，开启一段午间对话。
Kaur’s work offers a nuanced reflection on the fluidity and complexity of diasporic identity. Through processes of recombination and cultural encoding, seemingly mundane objects are transformed into carriers of hybrid meaning. She emphasizes the formative role of personal belongings in shaping identity. In 2017, at Eastside Projects in Birmingham, she presented The Five K’s, an installation composed of five large Axminster carpets—domestic objects commonly found in British South Asian households, and often used in Sikh communal gatherings. The forms of the carpets reference the Five Ks worn by initiated Sikhs: Kesh (hair), Kanga (comb), Kirpan (sword), Kara (bracelet), and Kachera (undergarment). Through this material convergence of British industrial textile and Sikh religious symbolism, Kaur articulates the layered entanglements of diasporic identity.
Within the Eastside Projects exhibition Artists House, Kaur extended an ongoing interest—initiated during her time at the RCA—in food as both material and social practice. She positions food as a disruption of the white cube, incorporating communal cooking and shared meals into the gallery space as modes of care, communication, and community formation. The Five K’s functioned as both sculptural installation and platform for collective dining, inviting audiences to sit upon the carpets and participate in conversation. The work thus blurred the boundary between exhibition and social encounter.
The Five K's, Eastside Projects, 2017
同年，她为V&A博物馆的“收藏欧洲”（Collecting Europe）展览创作了录像作品 YOOROP，通过截取印度流行电影的片段，颠覆传统的欧洲视角，展现其他文化如何构建对“欧洲”的想象。在另一件录像作品 女性撑起半边天（Women Hold Up Half The Sky）中，她利用1936年一张皇家军团的旧照片，将其中的印度士兵进行重新加工，探讨殖民历史中女性的存在如何被抹除以及后殖民时代的性别角色问题。Jasleen Kaur对女性——特别是后殖民与女性之间的交织关系的关注，不仅体现在此。2019年，她接受格拉斯哥女性图书馆（Glasgow Women’s Library）的委托，采访身边的印度裔女性，集结成册出版了《像特氟龙一样》（Be Like Teflon），这本书结合散文、论文、访谈与食谱，记录了从个体生命故事、家族历史到整个族群离散的经历，延续了她作品中对社区的深切关怀。
In the same year, Kaur contributed the video work YOOROP to the V&A exhibition Collecting Europe. Through appropriated clips from Indian popular cinema, she inverted dominant Eurocentric perspectives, foregrounding how Europe is imagined from elsewhere. In Women Hold Up Half The Sky, she reworked a 1936 Royal Legion photograph featuring Indian soldiers, interrogating the erasure of women within colonial histories and examining gendered dynamics in the postcolonial present. Kaur’s sustained engagement with feminist and postcolonial intersections extends beyond individual works. In 2019, commissioned by the Glasgow Women’s Library, she conducted interviews with women from the Indian diaspora, compiling them into the publication Be Like Teflon. Combining essays, interviews, recipes, and personal narratives, the book traces trajectories of family memory and collective migration, reinforcing her commitment to community as both subject and method.
Jasleen Kaur, YOOROP, V&A Museum, Goethe Institute, and British Council, Commissioned by for 'Collecting Europe'，2017, Video，5m50s
Sociomobile 也出现在她2023年于格拉斯哥Tramway画廊的个展“Alter Altar”中。这次展览是她入围透纳奖的作品之一，展览中她通过一系列雕塑与声音装置让空间充满文化记忆。阿克明斯特地毯、苏格兰的国民饮料Irn-bru、足球粉丝的围巾、政治传单、家庭照片等平凡物件再次成为她创作的主角。展览中的声响结合风琴、流行歌曲与锡克教传统吟唱，构成了一种真正的“复调”（polyphony），呈现多元文化与身份的交汇。
The motif of the “Sociomobile” reappeared in Kaur’s 2023 solo exhibition Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, a presentation that formed part of her Turner Prize nomination. The exhibition activated the gallery through sculptural assemblage and sound installation, drawing upon Axminster carpets, Irn-Bru (Scotland’s national soft drink), football scarves, political pamphlets, and family photographs. These quotidian objects were reconfigured into a spatial archive of cultural memory. The sonic environment—comprising organ music, popular songs, and Sikh devotional chant—produced a genuinely polyphonic field, embodying the coexistence of multiple cultural registers and identity formations.
Jasleen Kaur, Sociomobile, British Textile Biennial，2021
Jasleen Kaur, Alter Altar (exhibition view), Tramway，2023
她的作品往往游走于私人与公共的边界，既触及个体情感，又揭示更广泛的社会结构。通过物件的重新组合与再语境化，Kaur挑战了观者对熟悉事物的固定认知，将日常转化为具有深层意义的艺术语言。通过抽象与具体的结合，她挑战了观众对身体、记忆和感知的理解，促使人们反思身体如何成为个人历史与集体文化的交叉点。
作品Flesh ‘n’ Blood 极具个人与情感深度，展现了Jasleen Kaur对身体与记忆的独特探索。在这一系列中，家庭成员所写的治愈手册成为创作的起点，但作品远不止停留于身体的表层，而是深入探讨身体作为记忆、悲伤和治愈的容器。艺术家将个体与家族的经历编织在一起，思考悲伤、狂喜与代际传承如何通过身体被感知、转化甚至释放。
Kaur’s practice consistently traverses the threshold between private and public spheres, interweaving intimate affect with broader social structures. Through recontextualization, she unsettles fixed perceptions of the familiar, transforming everyday materials into sites of symbolic density. By juxtaposing abstraction and specificity, she invites reconsideration of how bodies, memories, and perceptions intersect. The body, in her work, emerges as a locus where personal history and collective culture converge.
The series Flesh ‘n’ Blood exemplifies the emotional depth of this inquiry. Beginning with healing manuals written by family members, the project expands into a meditation on the body as a vessel of grief, ecstasy, and intergenerational transmission. Rather than treating the body as surface, Kaur frames it as an archive—where trauma and care coexist, and where memory is not merely stored but continually negotiated and released.
Jasleen Kaur, Flesh 'n' Blood, Humber Street Gallery, 2021
Jasleen Kaur, Flesh 'n' Blood, Humber Street Gallery, 2021
在Jasleen Kaur的作品中，她通过对物件与声音的重新编排，追溯移民身份认同、个人童年与家族记忆、殖民及其遗产、宗教与文化传承等主题，持续探索印度血脉与英国之间的交错联系。她以日常为切入点，通过见微知著的方式挖掘人们赖以生存的信念，同时为诸如“印裔英国人”、“后殖民”或“移民”等抽象概念赋予具体的形象。Jasleen Kaur在物质与非物质之间架起了桥梁，也在文化的断裂与连续中找到了可能性。她的装置不仅是视觉艺术，更是一种时间的延展，让过去、现在与未来在同一个场域中对话。
Across her oeuvre, Kaur reorchestrates objects and sound to trace the entangled histories of migration, childhood, familial memory, colonial legacies, religion, and cultural inheritance. Beginning from the granular scale of the everyday, she renders visible the infrastructures of belief that shape lived experience, translating abstract categories—“British-Indian,” “postcolonial,” “immigrant”—into tangible, affective forms. By bridging material and immaterial dimensions, she identifies points of continuity within rupture. Her installations function not merely as visual propositions but as temporal environments in which past, present, and future cohabit within a shared spatial field.
Jasleen Kaur, I Keep Telling Them These Stories, Market Gallery, 2018