Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa are in the running for the Turner Prize 2025 – here they are with their work
The four artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2025 – Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa – work across an eclectic spectrum of materials and mediums. This year, themes from the spiritual to the political and personal are considered, through painting, sculpture, photography and installation.
An exhibition of the shortlisted artists’ work opens at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford on 27 September, running until 22 February 2026, as part of Bradford 2025 City of Culture. The jury, headed by Alex Farquharson, director, Tate Britain, and comprising Andrew Bonacina, independent curator; Sam Lackey, director, Liverpool Biennial; Priyesh Mistry, associate curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects, The National Gallery; and Habda Rashid, senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Fitzwilliam Museum, will announce the winner on 9 December 2025.
Nnena Kalu
Nnena Kalu’s installations are sculpturally sublime, encompassing tightly packed, colourful textiles and paper. By binding, layering and wrapping them in cellophane and tape, they become cocoon-like when hung, a process she repeats in a practice integral to her philosophy. The abstract, meandering patterns make a vibrant foil to her considerations of the space her works command.
Rene Matić
Artist and writer Matić intertwines personal references throughout works that consider broader themes of identity and belonging. Considering their family’s heritage, and their own, they include photographs of family and friends, showcased in frames that are stacked, to express moments of tenderness amidst turmoil. Matić also works with sound and installation to create an immersive environment that represents their experience in the community. Matić’s exhibition, Idols Lovers Mothers Friends, is currently on show at Arcadia Missa, London, until 3 June.
Mohammed Sami
Mohammed Sami is concerned with memory and loss, subjects he explores in evocative, large-scale paintings. Sami’s ambiguous works eschew the presence of people to focus instead on landscapes and environments, their emptiness reiterating the absence of people and the dearth of memory. In these ambiguous situations, the human presence is clearly near. Through layers of patterns and colours, Sami draws on his life in Baghdad during the Iraq War, and, later, his time as a refugee in Sweden.
Zadie Xa
Xa works across mural, textile, sound and painting to create spiritual works that put the sea as the focus, blending cultures and references to create ethereal other worlds. Tradition, folklore and stories combine in her installation at 2025’s Sharjah Biennial, which married bojagi patchwork and painting with a sculpture made of over 650 brass wind chimes inspired by Korean shamanic ritual bells.
Xa is nominated for ‘Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything’, with Benito Mayor Vallejo, at Sharjah Biennial 16.