Jasleen Kaur: Composing 'Supra'
What does it look like to capture the artistic process?
This is a film about the creative process, and the journey of experimentation.
We follow the Studios’ Alumni Artist, and Turner Prize winner Jasleen Kaur as she develops ‘Supra’, commissioned and developed as part of Assembly, Somerset House Studios’ experimental sound and music series, and presented as a live performance in March 2026. Her debut performance piece, this work marks a seminal moment in her career.
Through this documentary film we observe her as she facilitates space during rehearsals, carefully crafting the composition in her studio, and discussing the formative experiences that have influenced this work and her practice.
Working with this new medium for the first time, Kaur brings together an ensemble of musicians, also new to collaborating with one another. They encompass vocals, dilruba and trumpet - each instrumentalist’s sound representing the systems and structures we live and feel through, with the blurring of harmonic consonance and discordance to synthesise how intimate lives are shaped and marred by these wider forces.
The work’s tonal tension and collaged arrangement symbolise how events happening elsewhere reverberate both on a macro level – within public societal structures – and on a micro level, within the intimacy of our domestic lives and personal relationships.
Alongside this intimate documentary footage we enter dream sequences, transported back to driving around in the passenger seat of a parent’s car, to the bedroom discos with siblings, blasting music, and dancing to the flash of a cheap strobe light.
“I grew up in a community where singing and music were expected. Your voice was a technology that you could use together to conjure.”
Jasleen Kaur
