The Turner Prize 2025 Confronts Britain’s Past and Future

This year’s Turner Prize shortlist asks some pressing questions: what is the United Kingdom – and what could it be? Who gets to be heard in a country whose politics are only ever allowed to move rightwards? The exhibition is hosted at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford, the UK’s City of Culture for 2025. Bradford is often unfairly maligned, in part because of its post-industrial landscape and left-wing politics – the country’s first mass socialist group, the Independent Labour Party, was founded there in 1893, while more recently, George Galloway has served as its MP – and in part because of its large Asian population and long history of immigration, including the many German Jewish wool merchants who settled there in the mid-19th century. It’s an appropriate venue, then, for Rene Matić’s collection of photographs, flags and found objects depicting colonial legacies and queer, Black and working-class counterculture; Nnena Kalu’s cocoon-like sculptures made from repurposed fabric and other unconventional materials; Zadie Xa’s ambitious installation, which shifts between the supernatural and the real; and Mohammed Sami’s visceral paintings about conflict and its aftermath.

Sami is the only artist whose nominated work consists exclusively of painting, but he uses this most traditional and enduring form to subversive effect. Sami was shortlisted for an exhibition at Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace last year, where the disquieting imagery of his paintings, placed among the gilt-framed portraits, exposed the realities of empire as military occupation and the continuing postcolonial destruction of places such as his native Iraq. The works can be brutally direct: an imposing new work, The Hunter’s Return (2025), with its orange sky and green lasers trained across a deserted wasteland, is recognizably post-apocalyptic, making the aftermath of a human conflict look like a scene from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898). On Air (2024), however, is more ambiguous, its minimal depiction of a dim red bulb against a black background hinting at the power of propaganda to subjugate populations, but also the potential for radio in undermining dictatorships and countering misinformation.  Even if his Blenheim Palace works lose a little impact from being out of their original context, the advantage of Sami sticking to paintings, however stylistically diverse, is that his contribution adds up to a powerful, unified critique of Western foreign policy, instantly legible even when the works’ contrast with the imperial pomposity of the palace has to be imagined.

Matić’s installation is similarly direct, but where Sami asks what happens abroad to maintain power relations at home, Matić looks at people deemed superfluous to Britain’s electoral politics and, as such, demonized in both public discourse and law. The aim, and effect, is to humanize, achieved not just through a wall-spanning collage of photographs of pro-Palestine demonstrations, queer lovers or trans people dancing, and not only the calls for liberation that form part of the installation’s looped soundtrack, but also indications of the violence and prejudice that shape lives on the margins. A collection of Black dolls – an uncomfortable illustration of the racist ideas that structured the UK and its colonial expansion for centuries – sits on some shelves. Matić found and restored them – an act that raises more questions that any of their other work. What does it mean for an artist of colour to care for and display these dolls? Who might their original owners have been, and why did they want to own them? Can they be ‘reclaimed’, and if so, to what ends?

Zadie Xa’s installation aims for Gesamtkunstwerk status: visitors have to remove their shoes to walk on the golden reflective floor. Like Matić, Xa employs sound to successful effect, using bird and whale calls, bells and chimes to highlight Western uses of such soundscapes to soothe anxieties. Xa’s paintings take on a futurist aesthetic, yet engage with a radically different set of principles. Incorporating images of sea creatures rather than machines, they form part of a space in which to slow down and meditate: at one end of the room, shells hang from the ceiling, playing recordings of American feminist authors Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin and Alice Walker . Tapping into an unnamed but vibrant literary and artistic subculture that merges shamanism with science fiction, Xa takes us away from the difficult realities that Sami and Matić confront, instead presenting a personal vision of utopia that asks not what life is currently, but what it could be.

Nnena Kalu’s room, upstairs in the grandiose hall, features a series of large, colourful drawings of spirals with striking sculptures hanging in front of them. These are made from a variety of materials, predominantly fabric as well as cardboard and string, but the most notable is VHS tape. The video cassette is perhaps the most unloved of analogue media formats, not having the limited revival experienced by its musical equivalent, let alone that of vinyl records. Kalu salvages this detritus, making it a key part of her output, cannily reminding us that uses can always be found for apparently obsolete technology. In one of the four short films that accompany the exhibition, Kalu’s colleagues at ActionSpace, an organization which supports artists with learning disabilities and facilitates her work, explain her approach and contextualize the results within a contemporary art context. It is hugely significant that Kalu, who has limited verbal communication and is autistic, is the first artist with learning disabilities to be nominated for the prize. She would be a worthy winner, even if that is likely to provoke unsavoury responses from the UK’s ageing army of resentful right-wing newspaper columnists. The nominated works might not be as formally original as in decades past, but the Turner Prize remains one of the most high-profile cultural bulwarks against reactionary ideas of what the United Kingdom should be.

The Turner Prize 2025 is on view at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, until 22 February 2026. The winner of the Turner Prize 2025 will be announced on 9 December 2025

_{Main image: installation view of Nnena Kalu’s presentation at the Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery. Photograph: © David Levene}