Nnena Kalu wins the Turner Prize 2025

artist with bright materials — Nnena Kalu (Image credit: Courtesy of the Artist and ActionSpace)

Nnena Kalu has won The Turner Prize 2025, scooping the £25,000 award at a ceremony at Bradford Grammar School last night (10 December).

Kalu, who teases hanging sculptures from wrappings into immersive, cocoon-like shapes, was praised by the jury for her vibrant work, abstract sculptures and drawings. Her installations are sculpturally sublime, encompassing tightly packed, colourful textiles and paper. Created through a process of binding, layering and wrapping using cellophane and tape, they take on a cocoon-like appearance when hung; she repeats the method as one integral to her practice. The abstract, meandering patterns make a vibrant foil to her considerations of the space her works command.

artworks — Nnena Kalu, ‘Hanging Sculpture 1 to 10’, installation view, 2024

Says Alex Farquharson, chair of the jury and director of Tate Britain: 'Nnena’s work was very much selected for its quality but given she’s a neurodiverse artist, given her verbal communication is limited, she’s someone who previously would have been on the outside. Her win begins to erase that border between the neurotypical and neurodiverse artist. You suddenly become aware that actually it’s been a boundary around our history, and around contemporary art. But that boundary is dissolving.'

The shortlisted artists

Rene Matić

Artist and writer Matić intertwines personal references throughout works that consider broader themes of identity and belonging. Considering their family’s heritage, and their own, they include photographs of family and friends, showcased in frames that are stacked, to express moments of tenderness amidst turmoil. Matić also works with sound and installation to create an immersive environment that represents their experience in the community. Matić's exhibition, ‘Idols Lovers Mothers Friends’, is currently on show at Arcadia Missa, London, until 3 June 2025.

Matić was nominated for their solo exhibition, ‘AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH’, at CCA Berlin.

Mohammed Sami

Mohammed Sami is concerned with memory and loss, subjects he explores in evocative, large-scale paintings. Sami’s ambiguous works eschew the presence of people to focus instead on landscapes and environments, their emptiness reiterating the absence of people and the dearth of memory. In these ambiguous situations, the human presence is clearly near. Through layers of patterns and colours, Sami draws on his life in Baghdad during the Iraq War, and, later, his time as a refugee in Sweden.

Sami was nominated for his solo exhibition ‘After the Storm’ at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire.

Zadie Xa

Xa works across mural, textile, sound and painting to create spiritual works that put the sea as the focus, blending cultures and references to create ethereal other worlds. Tradition, folklore and stories combine in her installation at 2025's Sharjah Biennial, which married bojagi patchwork and painting with a sculpture made of over 650 brass wind chimes inspired by Korean shamanic ritual bells.

Xa was nominated for ‘Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything’, with Benito Mayor Vallejo, at Sharjah Biennial 16.

An exhibition of the shortlisted artists’ work is on view at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford until 22 February 2026, as part of Bradford 2025 City of Culture

bradford2025.co.uk

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Hannah Silver is a writer and editor with over 20 years of experience in journalism, spanning national newspapers and independent magazines. Currently Art, Culture, Watches & Jewellery Editor of Wallpaper*, she has overseen offbeat art trends and conducted in-depth profiles for print and digital, as well as writing and commissioning extensively across the worlds of culture and luxury since joining in 2019.