Turner Prize 2025: How to Heal a Ruptured World

This year’s Turner Prize installation is visually thrilling, with all four nominated artists channelling social and political issues that rage in the wider world. Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa variously confront the intolerant rhetoric of the far right and the violence of unchecked authoritarianism, or offer alternative means of connection that expand beyond rational and ableist ideals.

Established in 1984, the prize is awarded each year to a British or British-based artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work. This year we are in Bradford, the current U.K. City of Culture, at the former stately home of Cartwright Hall, whose high-ceilinged rooms provide a grand and imposing stage for the work on display. Each of the artists weaves their life experience into the work (both directly and indirectly), bringing an authentic and, at times, emotional voice to the broader issues they explore.

Take Matić, who grew up in the early 2000s in Peterborough with a Black skinhead father and white mother, and who explores the contradictions and frustrations of their own childhood to offer a nuanced approach to British identity politics. Family heritage is a guiding force in the work of Xa, too, as she explores her upbringing as a Korean Canadian girl in Vancouver, opening up a dialogue around ancestral communication in an installation which includes haunting whale song and sumptuous, trippy paintings.

Kalu’s large sculptures, and her drawings formed from careening lines and vivid colours, centre the creative process as a nonverbal means of expression, driven by her own lived experience as a learning-disabled artist with limited verbal communication. Sami’s richly coloured paintings tap into his memories of war and violence in Iraq, though scenes of imploded forests and crumpled clothing submerged in water feel almost meditative, calling forth the psychological remnants that linger after violent acts, rather than the blood and destruction of war itself.

It is tempting to connect many of these works to specific events in the world right now. Israel’s invasion of Gaza feels urgently present in Sami’s work, all of which has been made during the period since 7 October 2023, though his landscape scenes and tableaux are left deliberately ambiguous. The monochrome protest flag that hangs in the centre of Matić’s installation finds chilling new relevance in light of this month’s far-right protests across the U.K.

The exhibition captures the feeling of a society on the brink of collapse. As such, viewers will no doubt bring their own fears to the show, but it also retains an energy, and even a palpable sense of joy, in the face of horror. These artists confront ruptures of both internal and external worlds with curiosity and playfulness, inviting us to imagine new ways of connecting with ourselves and the societies we inhabit.

Nnena Kalu: Expression Beyond Words

Nnena Kalu’s frenetic, densely detailed drawings are created with acrylic pens, graphite, and soft pastels, built up in overlapping swirls that form vortex-like shapes. Her large sculptures, suspended with slender ropes from the ceiling, are made from practical materials such as VHS tape, corrugated black tubing, coloured plastic packaging, cling film, and fabric, formed through lively, rhythmic wrapping and twisting. She is a resident at Action Space, a charity which supports learning-disabled artists. With limited verbal communication, Kalu expresses a powerful sense of emotion and movement in her work, which makes for a mind-bending viewing experience. Her drawings are mesmeric, their mass of lines playing tricks before the eyes. Kalu often works to the rhythm of upbeat musicians such as ABBA and Stevie Wonder, the movement of her body dictating the shapes of her sculptural forms.

Kalu is nominated following her inclusion in Barcelona’s Manifesta 15; her installation for that show is reimagined for a domineering, wood-panelled room at Cartwright Hall. Her nomination for this year’s prize—the first time a learning-disabled artist has been included—taps into a broader, more recent embrace by the art world of intuitive ways of conveying ideas and feelings beyond traditional methods of both verbal and visual communication. Hanging from the ceiling, her sculptures evoke the organic forms of wild creatures, nests, or cocoons, their everyday materials glistening in the light.

Continuous lines feature heavily in Kalu’s work. In her drawings, contact between the body, pencil, and paper is intense and constant. Her sculptures have become bigger and bolder over the years, her studio space having expanded with Action Space’s relocation to London’s Studio Voltaire in 2021. They begin with simple tube or loop structures, with materials becoming bundled in tight knots and folds as they pass over each other repeatedly. This is big, zestful work that, quite literally, enables expression beyond words.

Rene Matić Confronts a War in Their Body

Rene Matić explores home as a place, body, or person that holds countless contradictions. In the video introduction to their Turner Prize installation, the artist describes whiteness and Blackness as feeling ‘at war in my body’ during their childhood, which they learned to counter with love and connection. Central to the installation is Untitled (No Place for Violence), a black-and-white flag which addresses the hypocrisy of political rhetoric. The four words of the title are cleaved into two halves on either side of the flag. In this split format, ‘No Place’ alone suggests a lack of belonging, only revealing its full significance when the viewer reads ‘For Violence’ on the reverse.

The work was made in response to President Biden’s condemnation of violence in America in 2024 while he continued to supply arms to Israel. But it feels equally timely now in the U.K., as the St George’s Cross is painted on roundabouts and raised in town centres in the name of patriotic unity, even as those behind these acts spout hateful and divisive rhetoric on race and immigration. At its heart, this work addresses the loaded territory of flags, questioning whom these symbols of national identity ultimately protect and whom they punish.

Matić is nominated for their show As Opposed to the Truth, held at CCA Berlin in 2024, where Untitled (No Place for Violence) was first shown. Here, it hangs in the centre of the space while, along the back wall, large overlapping photographic prints featuring near-lifesize figures are pressed behind glass sheets. Matić is part of a queer young creative community for whom active political engagement is an everyday part of life; the raw, energetic images are taken at parties, protests, and on the street, homing in on scrawled phrases seen on public walls and bridges (‘pissed off trannies’, ‘unite or perish’), or capturing playful shots of clubbers snogging. A crackly soundtrack of a cappella singing and the muffled voices of figures such as bell hooks and Nina Simone plays throughout the exhibition—a disjointed dreamscape from others who have promoted radical love and challenged racial division.

Mohammed Sami’s Ghosts of Conflict

Mohammed Sami’s paintings depict geographically non-specific landscapes that appear to have been blasted by munitions or trampled by hooves. Many of his works feel meditative and peaceful until smaller details emerge. In Hiroshima Mon Amour (2024), a swell of water submerges the canvas, with two empty, ethereal items of clothing floating beneath the surface, appearing more corpse-like the longer they are observed. The Grinder (2023) features a table and chairs viewed from above, cast over by the long shadow of a ceiling fan. While the empty interior, from this unsettling aerial perspective, possesses a chilling presence, it is only the title that points to something truly horrific, the fan’s forms readable as sharp blades.

A single human presence is depicted in Reborn (2023): a burly figure sitting formally in military regalia, their head torn clean off above the chin, and a moth in place of their mouth. The grandeur of their costume conflicts with the dishevelled and flattened landscapes in the surrounding works. This series was created for Sami’s 2024 solo show After the Storm at Blenheim Palace, a building created for the first Duke of Marlborough in the 1800s as a reward for his military triumphs. For that exhibition, Sami wished to contrast the building’s glorification of war and power with the destruction left in its wake.

Sami was born in Baghdad in 1984, and began his career as an artist painting propaganda images for Saddam Hussein’s regime. While his works could be read as a direct comment on the Iraq War and the trauma of his earlier years, he leaves this open to interpretation. His works connect with war and destruction the world over, serving no individual ideology but commenting more broadly on the horrors of political and state-enforced violence.

Zadie Xa Dives into a Sublime Subaquatic World

Zadie Xa transports her viewers to the depths of the sea and the outer reaches of space. Weaving together Korean mythology and supernatural motifs, she taps into a collective psyche shaped by cultural history and enduring ancestral shockwaves. Growing up in Canada with Korean heritage, Xa is inspired by both Christian iconography and traditional Korean folklore. She combines painting with performance in complex, large-scale installations, crafting elaborate costumes and channelling a love of staging and ritual that she witnessed in Catholic church services growing up, and which are also central to shamanic practices, which she sees as early forms of artistic expression.

Xa is nominated for her installation Moonlight Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything, shown at Sharjah Biennial 16 and reimagined for Cartwright Hall. Comprising painting, sound, and hanging bells, the installation dances before the eyes. The floor is coated in a reflective gold material, throwing watery shapes onto the ceiling. Paintings in which skeletons, whales, and sweeping seas swirl and distort are reflected on the floor. Xa creates a place somewhere between reality and imagination, between this world and another realm.

Unconventional and intuitive forms of communication are threaded throughout. Whale sounds playing through speakers make it seem suddenly possible to speak beyond words, conveying an anthropomorphic clarity in their expression that almost approaches language, and which heaves with emotion. It is a particularly poignant note to Xa’s presentation at a time when whale calls in the wild are rapidly declining due to habitat and food loss. Xa views folk art as a language that connects us directly to our ancestors. This creative form has, over the years, enabled permissible methods of subversion—both political and personal—using performance and humour. The ethereal, provocative space Xa creates in this installation shows how alive the world could really feel if we allowed ourselves to listen to its inherent magic. —[O]

The Turner Prize 2025 exhibition is on view at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, U.K., from 27 September 2025 to 22 February 2026.

Main image: Mohammed Sami, The Grinder (2023) (detail). Exhibition view: Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford (27 September 2025–22 February 2026). Courtesy Blenheim Art Foundation. Photo: © David Levene.