Turner Prize 2025

But honestly, in an era where flashy headlines engineered to cause outrage and endless clickbait desperately compete for attention, doesn’t it also feel like a good moment to step back from the screaming noise and put the human experience of care, loss, connection, and presence at the centre?

That’s what this year’s Turner Prize nominees share, though each approaches it differently: through the documentation of life, through the absence of human presence, through immersive experiences that explore invisible aspects of being, and through repetitive, meditative gestures that turn simple lines into volumes one can get lost in.

Presented at Cartwright Hall as part of the UK City of Culture 2025, this year’s Turner Prize exhibition brings four shortlisted artists to Bradford, where their works will be on view until February next year. Since 1984, the Turner Prize has been awarded annually (except a pause in 1990) to a British or UK-based artist for an outstanding presentation of recent work. This year’s jury – Alex Farquharson, Andrew Bonacina, Sam Lackey, Priyesh Mistry, and Habda Rashid – selected the nominated artists and will choose the winner, who will be announced on December 9.

At twenty-eight, Rene Matić is the youngest of the nominees. Spanning photography, sculpture, textiles, sound, moving image, and writing, their practice celebrates and explores in-betweenness, a theme Matić, of mixed-race background and identifying as non-binary, approaches from a deeply personal perspective. Their images, part of the photography installation Feelings Wheel, capture moments of intimacy, memory, and queer love, revealing themselves like pages of a visual diary. A large white fabric hanging in the middle of the space, reading “NO SPACE” on one side and “FOR VIOLENCE” on the other, divides the room and reflects Matić’s fascination with the contradiction inherent in flags. From the speakers, songs by Rihanna mix with chants from pro-Palestine protests and field recordings, merging into a soundscape of the now.

Where Matić’s work puts human presence at its centre, it is the absence of people that defines the paintings of Mohammed Sami. The Iraq-born artist’s large-scale works speak of war and displacement, depicting landscapes and interiors that echo moments which have passed. Disquieting like flashbacks from the subconscious, his works open up a world of ambiguity that invites us to sense, to ask, and to see what is not there. Traces of experiences, places, and people that were once present linger in his spaces. Sami’s painting The Grinder, for example, shows an abandoned table seen from a bird’s-eye view. A still-standing ceiling fan, or perhaps a drone, casts an ominous shadow, making us wonder why the people previously sitting here might have stood up and left. In The Hunter’s Return, the sky burns red and orange above a destroyed landscape, cut by sharp, laser-like lines of light. Unsure if this is the aftermath, prelude, or the midst of a war unfolding, we become aware that it is often the things we don’t see, what is left to the imagination, that touch us most deeply.

Artist Zadie Xa invites viewers into a world of her own. Shoes off. Visitors step onto the gold-plated mirrored floor that forms the foundation of the installation, which was first presented at the Sharjah Biennial 16 as Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything. Spanning sculpture, painting, sound, and textiles, this cosmos draws on spiritual rituals, craft, and mythology, as well as Xa’s Korean-Canadian heritage. Murals of the rising and setting sun are reflected in the mirrored floor, while hundreds of small bells and seashells act as sculptural gestures that fill the space with soft, ethereal sounds. Xa collaborated with artist Benito Mayor Vallejo to develop the murals and sculptural elements of the installation. As complex as its title, the installation is visually striking, yet so composed, it feels just beyond reach.

Immersive as well, yet with fewer mystical layers, is the work of Nnena Kalu. Her practice grows out of rhythmic, repetitive gestures: wrapping and binding fabric, paper, VHS tapes, and film strips until shapes and volumes begin to form. Her drawings, including the diptych Drawing 21, mirror this process: through the endless tracing of a single line, depth suddenly emerges and pulls the viewer in. As the first artist with a learning disability and limited verbal communication to be nominated for the Turner Prize, Kalu’s inclusion expands the notion of who can speak and be seen within contemporary art. While some criticise her work as not provocative enough, Kalu’s inclusion challenges the idea that art’s value solely lies in confrontation or spectacle. It gestures toward a broader, more nuanced understanding of how meaning takes shape, and whose voices are finally being recognised.

The Turner Prize this year doesn’t try to shock, it observes, it listens, and maybe that’s exactly what makes it powerful.