The Turner Prize, that perennial bellwether of artistic daring—or artistic controversy, depending on which pub you’re eavesdropping in—has named its 2025 shortlist. Four artists, each a different kind of storyteller, will converge this autumn at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford to offer Britain a mirror polished with the jagged cloths of identity, history, and personal myth.
It’s J. M. W. Turner’s 250th birthday, and somewhere—maybe in the spectral mists he so loved to paint—he’s chuckling at the nerve of it all.
The Quartet Shaping Contemporary British Art
Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa form this year’s constellation. Each name is a portal, each practice a quiet mutiny against expected forms. Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson praised their “breadth of artistic practice,” but to call it breadth is to miss the wild urgency humming beneath their work.
Nnena Kalu: The Spiraling Force
Born in Glasgow, Kalu sculpts worlds from what most might discard: fabrics, VHS tape, everyday refuse. Her swirling, cocoonlike sculptures and frenetic drawings refuse containment, much like the artist herself, whose limited verbal communication only sharpens her visual roar. In her work, materials molt their former lives and slip into new skins.
Kalu’s sculptures hang not like trophies but like declarations—a testament to the raw, ecstatic act of making.
Rene Matić: Belonging, Tender and Unmade
At twenty-seven, Peterborough-born Rene Matić operates with the precision of a scalpel and the tenderness of a lullaby. Through photography, sound, and assemblage (yes, dolls included), Matić dissects themes of belonging and identity, particularly in Britain’s shifting social landscapes. Their work doesn’t ask permission; it enters the bloodstream and stays there.
To witness Matić’s practice is to understand that identity isn’t a fixed point—it’s a moving, breakable, and luminous thing.
Mohammed Sami: Landscapes That Bleed Memory
Born in Baghdad and now a Londoner by exile, Mohammed Sami paints landscapes heavy with unspeakable memory. His vast canvases are neither overt nor decorative; they ache. War, displacement, and loss hum beneath every brushstroke, like bass notes you can feel in your chest.
Sami’s art doesn’t recreate tragedy—it extracts its lingering afterimages, refusing to let the horrors of forced migration fade quietly into oblivion.
Zadie Xa: Rituals Beyond Species and Borders
Zadie Xa’s installations are riotous symphonies of sound, video, painting, and performance. Vancouver-born with Korean roots, Xa conjures diasporic identities that flirt with the boundaries between human, animal, and myth. Her worlds are immersive—not spaces you view, but spaces that swallow you whole.
In Xa’s hands, storytelling becomes ceremony, and cultural memory slithers into new, transcendent shapes.
A Prize, A Provocation
The Turner Prize has always been less about the trophy (£25,000 for the winner, £10,000 for the rest) and more about the conversation it ignites. Some years that conversation has been electric; others, tedious. Already, the 2025 shortlist has inspired sighs from the cynics (“the soppiest ever,” says The Guardian) and nods of cautious respect from The Telegraph and The New York Times.
What cannot be denied is this: the shortlisted artists are not interested in pleasing anyone. They are too busy mapping new territories where pain, resilience, memory, and myth converge and combust.
Whether or not this year’s exhibition feels “edgy” enough for the critics craving spectacle, it promises something richer: an exploration of how personal worlds, fiercely inhabited, might reshape the public one.
Bradford Beckons
From September 27, 2025, to February 22, 2026, Cartwright Hall will hum with these four distinct frequencies. On December 9, someone will walk away with the Turner Prize itself, but the real victory will belong to those who step into the gallery willing to be unraveled, remade, and perhaps—if they’re lucky—transformed.
J. M. W. Turner would, it seems, approve.