Artists Simeon Barclay, Kira Freije, Marguerite Humeau, and Tanoa Sasraku have been shortlisted for the 2026 Turner Prize. Each artist will receive £10,000 ($13,500), and an exhibition of their work will take place at Teesside University’s Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) in North England, from September 26 through March 29th, 2027. An awards ceremony on December 10th, also at MIMA, will announce the winner, who will be awarded £25,000 ($33,760).
Presented by Tate Britain, the Turner Prize is the United Kingdom’s most prestigious recognition of contemporary visual art. Named for the painter J.M.W. Turner and established in 1984, the prize is awarded annually to a British artist to honor an exceptional exhibition or presentation of their work. Last year, it was awarded to Nnena Kalu, and previous winners have included Anish Kapoor, Steve McQueen, and Lubaina Himid.
The 2026 Turner Prize nominees
Multidisciplinary artist Simeon Barclay works across performance, installation, video, sound, writing, and sculpture, using a mix of industrial fabrication techniques and found materials and images (he worked in the manufacturing industry before turning to art making). He is nominated for The Ruin, the artist’s first live performance, which took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and The Hepworth Wakefield in 2025.
The work interrogates the layers of identity surrounding class, masculinity, and inheritance that make up the modern British experience. It employs spoken word, early modern music, and manufacturing sounds, with performers in costumes evoking the industrial landscape of Northern England in the 1980s and 1990s.
Sculptor Kira Freije is known for her abstract aluminium corporeal forms that incorporate faces cast of loved ones, fabric, lighting, handblown glass, and found materials. The sculptures, which include casts of Freije’s hands and feet, draw on her experience working with blacksmiths following her graduation from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford in 2011.
She is nominated for her exhibition, “Unspeak the Chorus” at the Hepworth Wakefield in West Yorkshire, which is currently on view through May 6th. It marks her first major solo presentation in the U.K.
Installation artist Marguerite Humeau explores worlds, both imagined and research-based, from prehistoric times through to the speculative future. She makes visually rich, intricate installations that fuse poetry, sound, video, and drawing to interrogate the transition between life and death, origin and ending; posing questions about existence along the way.
She is nominated for “Torches,” an exhibition presented at Denmark’s ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art and Finland’s Helsinki Art Museum in 2025. In the show, a multisensory landscape represents a partly-imagined ecosystem in transition, using a mix of organic and found materials like beeswax, wasp venom, yeast, bronze, and alabaster.
Tanoa Sasraku, whose practice spans drawing, filmmaking, and sculpture, is known for her work that uses printmaking, sewing, and garment construction to consider how power structures and landscapes are shaped over time.
She is nominated for her solo show “Morale Patch,” which opened last year at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, which comments on the power struggles and conflicts surrounding diminishing natural resources. Crude oil plays a starring role, both as subject and material, alongside found objects tied to the oil industry presented as relics of an empire.
“It is a privilege to announce this outstanding shortlist,” said Alex Farquaharson, director of the Tate Britain and the chair of the prize’s jury, in a press statement. “The Turner Prize continues to offer the public a compelling reflection of the breadth and vitality of contemporary British art. This year’s selection presents a rich and diverse range of work, spanning installation and performance, and with a strong emphasis on sculptural practice. Each artist invites us into carefully constructed scenarios, both real and imagined, that offer distinct perspectives through which to explore the world around us, and to reflect on our place within it.”
