The Turner Prize has pooped its own 40th birthday party

This year marks the Turner Prize’s 40th anniversary but 2024’s shortlist, announced yesterday, feels more dutiful than jubilant – and not especially essential or inspired.

Reflecting various ongoing, now-orthodox concerns in contemporary art – the celebration of older, hitherto-overlooked artists of colour, for instance, or, as Tate’s press bumph puts it, an engagement with “colonial histories” and “the impacts of imperialism” – it may even express neutrality on the part of the jury, after scratching around for a definitive, unmissable exhibition they didn’t find. There’s little provocation here, no stunts, and nothing, artistically, glitteringeyed or excitingly dangerous.

Claudette Johnson’s nomination, for two exhibitions (one in New York; the other at the Courtauld, hardly an institution associated with today’s avant-garde), is a case in point. It follows a change in the prize’s rubric (first implemented in 2017), so that artists over 50 can be considered.

There’s nothing objectionable about Johnson’s monumental and colourful figurative pastels of black subjects – but they are being honoured as much for that subject matter as their technique (which is entirely, even timidly, conventional), as the British art world seeks to make amends for mostly ignoring Johnson and her peers since the BLK Art Group (the children of Caribbean migrants raised in the West Midlands) emerged during the 1980s.

Pio Abad – who was born in Manila in 1983 and now lives in London – is nominated for a show at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, which is also not somewhere you’d naturally turn for invigorating new British art. To Those Sitting in Darkness is an elegant, impressive exhibition even if, in his work, there’s a certain coolness and above-the-fray precision.

Delaine Le Bas’s Incipit Vita Nova, at Vienna’s Secession, was, seemingly, blessed with greater vigour; the jury, I note, commended the recent “boldness” of her approach. It’s hard, though, to vanquish a suspicion that, consciously or not, her nomination may also have been motivated in part by identity politics. Now knocking on 60, Le Bas comes from a Romany background, which she addresses in her work.

I imagine she’ll bring some welcome zest to the exhibition this September – which will be held at Tate Britain for the first time in six years – as, I hope, will the 37-yearold Jasleen Kaur (at last, a shortlisted artist who hasn’t yet turned 40), and has been nominated for Alter Altar, a solo show of “sculptural and sonic works” at Tramway in Glasgow, where she grew up in a Sikh community. Family photographs appeared in Alter Altar, as did Irn-Bru, a football fan’s scarf – and a vintage red Ford Escort cabriolet (representing Kaur’s father’s “first car and his migrant desires”), covered in a gigantic cotton doily, and with a subwoofer in the boot.

As the Turner Prize prepares to celebrate a significant birthday, at least one of this year’s nominated artists is ready to bring the party.

The shortlist reflects various ongoing, now-orthodox concerns in contemporary art

Jogging memories: Jasleen Kaur has been shortlisted for her Alter Altar show