The Peter Dormer Lecture 2025 - Jasleen Kaur: Geography

The Peter Dormer Lecture 2025: Jasleen Kaur: Geography

“I've been thinking a lot about geography recently, about orientation and geography being about seeing and looking in particular ways. I'm often making work about how histories are managed and manufactured and how intimate life is marred by these wider forces. I wanted to map a constellation of places for you, that sit within varying degrees of intimacies to me, to think about how histories and narratives are managed and manufactured, socialised and maintained.” Jasleen Kaur 2025
---
Born in Glasgow in 1986, Jasleen Kaur is an artist whose multimedia practice explores cultural memory and political belonging through material and immaterial frameworks, and shared histories. She is particularly drawn to the hidden and intangible dimensions of social and personal histories to question how the narratives we inherit circulate and shape us. A graduate of the RCA Applied Art programme in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewellery (now Jewellery and Metal), Kaur has continued to blur the boundaries between material objects and immaterial traces, histories and affect.
In 2023, Jasleen returned to Glasgow to present the exhibition Alter Altar at Tramway, in which sculptural and sonic works explored improvisation and political mysticism. Axminster carpet, bottles of blessed Irn Bru, political flyers, and salvaged family photographs were reworked to generate new cultural readings. In December of that year, for a restaging of this exhibition, Kaur was awarded the Turner Prize, the UK’s most prominent award for contemporary art.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher The Peter Dormer Committee & Royal College of Art