Turner Prize 2025 exhibition review: 'four artists who could hardly be more different'

Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford ★★★★

The Turner Prize is in Bradford this year, opening as a year of events as UK City of Culture draws to a close. As has been the case for the last several years, the panel has chosen four artists who could hardly be more different.

One of them is Glasgow-born Nnena Kalu, an autistic and learning disabled artist with limited verbal expression. Her nomination has been hailed as a “watershed moment for arts and disability” and some are tipping her to win the £25,000 prize on 9 December.

Each shortlisted artist has been allocated an identical space in the wings of the Victorian gallery in Bradford’s Lister Park. Kalu’s is the most visually arresting. It seems to buzz with energy. Her drawings - often made in pairs - are swirling vortices of lines. In her sculptures, she takes the line into three dimensions, winding strips of fabric, ribbon, plastic packaging and old VHS tape around cocoon-like forms, linking and hanging them to make sprawling installations.

Kalu, 58, was born in Glasgow to Nigerian parents and moved at a young age to London where she has been supported by disabled arts organisation ActionSpace since 1999. Her Turner Prize nomination comes as a result of the inclusion of her drawings in a group show at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and a sculptural commission for Manifesta 15 in Barcelona.

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In the past, her work has been presented without reference to her disability, and the fact that her team chose to do it here is in part motivated by the sense that all four of the shortlisted artists draw on aspects of biography in their work.

Ironically, Kalu does so the least. Her work is pure instinct, a revelling in materials, an intuitive sense of colour and form. The term Outsider Art might not be popular these days, but her work has the rawness and energy which often characterises Art Brut. She might be the most instinctive artist here, and some think she deserves to win.

Downstairs from Kalu is Zadie Xa, 42, a Canadian Korean artist based in London. Visitors need to take off their shoes, or don shoe-covers, to walk on the golden mirrored floor of her immersive space. Paintings on stitched-together pieces of canvas reference the Korean craft practice of bojagi, projections dance on the coloured walls. An intricate mobile of shamanic bells hangs over a mirrored plinth in the shape of Nautilus shell.

In the four corners of the room, giant shells suspended from the ceiling broadcast sound: ocean waves, whale song, bird calls, texts by Alice Walker and Octavia Butler, a dark fable by Ursula K LeGuin. The largest painting features a shaman, dancers and sea creatures in a drama which appears to be taking place under water. Indeed, perhaps everything is.

Part treatise on the state of the oceans, part conversation with Xa’s Korean ancestors, this work pulls so many references into its watery dreaminess that the viewer is mesmerised, but also somewhat confused. While Xa’s commitment to her quest is not in doubt, she might not succeed in taking the audience with her.

Painter Mohammed Sami, 40, grew up in Iraq through the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and the second Gulf War. A graduate of Ulster University School of Art and Goldsmiths, he was nominated for After the Storm, an exhibition at Blenheim Palace in which his works were shown amongst the building’s historical paintings of military heroes and victories.

He seems determined to subvert the expectation that he will make work about war, while nevertheless making work about war. Conflict infuses his paintings, yet the images themselves are still and unpeopled. The violence has just taken place, or soon will. There are few specific references to time or place. Nothing is fixed.

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In the largest work - and these works are very large - The Hunter’s Return, green laser beams criss-cross a clearing in a palm forest. The ground is cratered and pock-marked, the sky ablaze. The painting places us, the viewers, in the midst of a conflict zone, but as hunter or hunted? Victim or aggressor? Do these terms even have any bearing here?

Massacre happens in a field of sunflowers (a reference to Ukraine?) in which the thick paint in the foreground is trampled with the marks of horses’ hooves. Broken crockery is painted into a black, stormy seascape; a portrait of a decorated hero seems to dissolve and decay. In The Grinder, the shadow of a ceiling fan falls on an ornate table looking like helicopter blades.

Sami paints very well, and works from a knowledge of the painting of the past while employing a determinedly contemporary vision. He also has a big subject to get his teeth into. His work draws the viewer in, and grows richer the more time we spend with it. He has, rightly, emerged as the favourite to win.

Rene Matić is, at 28, one of the youngest artists ever shortlisted for the prize, and their practice feels generationally different to the other three. The driving theme is identity, belonging and Britishness, from the perspective of an artist who is non-white, non-binary and working-class. Photography is central, but Matić also works in textiles, sound and film.

One of the first objects the viewer encounters is a small photograph in a large perspex frame showing an England flag next to a notice reading “Private Party”. It’s a succinct statement at the beginning of a sprawling show: a big white flag bisects the space bearing the words “No place/for violence” recto and verso. There’s a collection of black dolls, and a sound work which includes church bells, trans rights protesters, London commuters chanting “Free Palestine” and Rihanna singing Lift Me Up.

At the far end of the room is a collection of photographs entitled Feelings Wheel, displayed in the same unwieldy perspex frames: pictures of protests and parties, queer kisses, graffiti, a baby, a remembrance book. The work is fragmented, a scatter-gun approach which foregrounds feeling, and the presentation accentuates the sense of fragmentation. As a representative of emerging practices, it ticks all the boxes, but I’d rather see Matić’s work in ten years time when the ideas and the approach have had time to mature.

I don’t know if anyone bets on the Turner Prize any more, but it has always been a hard one to call. A victory for Kalu would be a game-changer for disabled artists. Sami’s work is the stand-out, but it’s rare for a painter to win. We wait for 9 December, and let the chips fall where they may.

Until 22 February

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