Turner prize 2024 review – vitality, surprise … and a Ford Escort in a doily

Tate Britain, London
The nominees bring in bottles of Irn-Bru, gigantic concrete jewellery and blood-red footprints in a show filled with moving cultural collisions and humour

Jasleen Kaur’s red Ford Escort, standing in the gallery and covered by a giant cotton doily, its sound system blasting out snatches of pop and hip-hop and qawwali devotional song will surely be the laugh-out-loud totemic image of this year’s Turner prize show at Tate Britain. It is but one of several arresting moments, in a show filled with cultural collisions, shifts in register and wildly divergent intentions. Business as usual, then.

It’s raining ink. It’s erupting in hearts and skulls and human faces, and in a menagerie of human hares, tree-people and coral in Delaine Le Bas’s labyrinthine installation. Blood-red footprints cross the gallery floor. A can-can of naked legs, a bulbous paper dragonfly, a galumphing sad-sack horse fashioned from organdie stuffed with hay and feathers are among the profusion of ideas and images. Figures loom in hanging, translucent cotton tents and there are mythological and magical signs and portents everywhere in Le Bas’s work.