Critics have been having their say as the latest edition of the UK’s Turner Prize launched yesterday (23 September) with an exhibition at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery.
The nomination of the learning disabled artist Nnena Kalu for this year’s Turner Prize has been described by UK culture professionals as a watershed moment. “It represents a really significant moment for the learning disabled artist community, not just nationally but internationally,” says Michael Raymond, a co-curator of the Turner Prize exhibition.
The Scottish artist’s work—comprising suspended sculptures bound with rope and tape along with swirling vortex drawings—is on show in the Turner Prize exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford (27 September-22 February 2026) as part of the UK City of Culture festival. Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa have also been nominated.
“[It is] incredibly important that a learning disabled artist with limited verbal communication… is exhibiting on this level,” says the writer and curator Lisa Slominski in an exhibition film. Kalu’s practice is supported by the visual arts organisation ActionSpace. which runs a studio at Studio Voltaire in south London. Kalu’s primary assistant, Charlotte Hollinshead, the head of Artist Development at ActionSpace, has worked with Kalu since 1999.
Nnena Kalu
Courtesy of the Artist and Action Space
Kalu is nominated for her contribution to the Conversations exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and for her work Hanging Sculpture 1 to 10 at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona. The prize judges, which include the independent curator Andrew Bonacina, selected the nominees on the basis of what they felt to be the strongest and best exhibitions of the past year, adds Raymond. “[Hosting the show in Bradford] means so much to the artistic community in Bradford and the wider West Yorkshire region,” he adds.
Adrian Searle of the Guardian tips her for the win. “The repetitive spiralling vortices of her drawings all depend as much on where she leaves off, on their returns and alterations, on flow and variation, as they do on the body transcribing its actions on to paper. They are riotous and rhythmic, purposeful and compelling. There’s no fudging. Kalu deserves to win this year’s Turner prize.”
The Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami, who grew up under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, is also in the running. Baghdad-born Sami is nominated for his solo exhibition, After the Storm, which was held at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire last year. The show’s paintings were made in response to the grandiose English estate, which is the family seat of the dukes of Marlborough and the birthplace of the wartime prime minister Winston Churchill.
Installation view of Mohammed Sami’s presentation at the Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery
Photo: David Levene
Meanwhile Peterborough-born Rene Matić explores ideas around Britishness. In the show As Opposed to the Truth at the CCA Berlin, Matić showed Untitled (No Place for Violence, 2024), which, according to the artist, seeks to “embarrass the kind of principle of what a flag is supposed to be”. The cloth is draped across the space at Cartwright Hall.
Raymond says: “Rene’s practice draws upon identity, society and contemporary culture that feels incredibly relevant and prescient, from the flag in the centre of the exhibition to the references including the sound piece 365 [2024-25] which includes a clip of a trans-rights activist talking about the gender court ruling in April [the UK supreme court ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex].”
Installation view of Rene Matić, Feelings Wheel (2022-25) at Turner Prize 2025,
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery.
Courtesy of the artist, Arcadia Missa, London and Chapter NY, New York. Photo: David Levene
Zadie Xa’s presentation Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything uses painting, sound textiles and sculpture to consider links between ocean life, generational grief, Korean shamanism and ghostly spirits, says a wall text. “With its gold vinyl floor and a trippy sound piece played via speakers inside four suspended seashells, her room is certainly striking,” says the Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke—who singles out Sami as deserving the prize.
Nancy Durrant in The Times favours Sami’s work too. “Evocative, allusive and fantastically well executed, these are stunning works that reward lengthy contemplation,” she says.
The winner, to be announced 9 December, will receive £25,000 while each of the other three shortlisted artists will receive £10,000. The charitable foundation set up by Lord Browne of Madingley and the Uggla Family Foundation established by Lance Uggla—a trustee of the Tate Foundation—are again exhibition sponsors.
