‘Your stories arise.
Material memories of the collective pressing on the personal, wider forces shaping and pressing against us
now and then.
Sometimes I wish I knew what I really thought about where we all are right now,
but then again,
I’ve never been one for absolutes’ (1)
Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present Boomerang, Jasleen Kaur's first solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring a new body of work, which considers how histories and narratives are managed and manufactured, socialised and maintained.
Throughout the exhibition, Kaur looks not only to the movement of the boomerang, but also to the concept of the ‘imperial boomerang’ propounded by author and politician Aimé Césaire. As his thesis contends, the boomerang effect reveals how violence cannot be contained – the imperial centre is the place where the boomerang’s arc of flight begins, spilling out degradation across the spaces of empire, before circling back to its origin. Kaur’s experiential entanglement blurs the demarcation of ‘over there’ and the ‘over here.’ Her work emanates from a position of how events happening elsewhere reverberate both on a macro level, in public societal structures, and on a micro level, within the intimacy of our domestic lives and personal relationships.
The significance embedded in found materials, or ‘residue’, and the use of artisanal processes are important to the artist. Both pose questions of value and manufacture, while also asking how we might move through the present in relation to historic memory across geography and generation.
Within the structure of the gallery, Kaur has found corners and lintels that become passages into the exhibition, forming thresholds, structures and logics that touch upon the ownership of space and the ties between seemingly unrelated series of events and sites of conflict. From what position are we observing? Who decides how we remember? A navigation of factual biography and ‘felt’ self is in constant flux; the works in the exhibition speak of this vulnerability, and a desire to simultaneously reveal and protect.
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Jasleen Kaur (b.1986 Pollokshields, Glasgow) lives and works in London, UK. Solo exhibitions include Boomerang, Hollybush Gardens, London; Was. Is. Will be., public commission for Thamesmead, London (forthcoming, November 2025); Alter Altar, Tramway, Glasgow (2023); Flesh ‘n’ Blood, Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2021); Gut Feelings Meri Jaan, Touchstones Rochdale (2021) and Be Like Teflon, Glasgow Women’s Library (2019). She is the winner of the 2024 Turner Prize, and the 2021 Paul Hamlyn Artist Award. In 2025, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Glasgow School of Art.
Forthcoming projects in 2026 include commissions for BBC Tea Factory x Grand Union, Digbeth, Birmingham and Art Explora x V&A East, London. Selected group exhibitions include PUSH THE LIMITS 2, Merz Foundation; The Three Legged Cat, 18th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul; Maybe we could both belong, Den Frie, Copenhagen; Who Wants Flowers When They Are Dead?, The Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead; Lives Less Ordinary, Two Temple Place, London (all 2025); Imagining Otherwise, Primary, Nottingham; CLASSifications, Aspex, Portsmouth (2024); Not new, otherwise, Build Hollywood, Glasgow (2023); A Tall Order!, Touchstones, Rochdale (2023); My Body is a temple of Gloom, Wellcome Collection, London (2021); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2019); The Driver’s Seat, Cubitt Gallery, London (2018); This is Water, MIMA, Middlesbrough (2018); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017). In 2019 her book Be Like Teflon was co-published by Glasgow Women’s Library and Dent-De-Leone.
Her work is held in public collections including Arts Council Collection, UK; Crafts Council Collection, London, UK; Fenix Museum, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Government Arts Collection, UK; The University of Warwick Art Collection, UK; Touchstones Rochdale, UK and National Galleries of Scotland, UK.
