The four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize have been announced. They include Scottish sculptor Nnena Kalu, who is nonverbal autistic, and Mohammed Sami, an Iraqi British painter born and raised under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The other two artists shortlisted were Rene Matić from Peterborough and London-based Korean Canadian artist Zadie Xa.
The nominees were revealed by Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain’s director and chair of the Turner Prize jury, on a drab Wednesday morning in Tate Britain’s Clore Gallery.
“It’s an honor to announce the Turner Prize shortlist [which] reflects the breadth of artistic practice today,” Farquharson said, against the backdrop of several large J.M.W. Turner landscapes, after whom the award is named. “Each of the artists offers a unique way of viewing the world through personal experience and expression. On Turner’s 250th birthday, I’m delighted to see his spirit of innovation is still alive and well in contemporary British art today.”
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Only Britain-based artists are considered for the country’s most prestigious art prize, which strives to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. It was established in 1984, and the winner will receive £25,000. Shortlisted artists will pocket £10,000 each.
Artists are nominated for work they have created over the past 12 months. At 27, Matić is the youngest artist to be shortlisted since Damien Hirst, who won the prize at age 30 in 1995 for his dissected cows in formaldehyde, titled Mother and Child Divided.
This year’s entries, to be shown at the Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in September as part of Bradford’s UK City of Culture celebrations, are less likely to cause such a stir as Hirst’s chopped-up cattle did.
Kalu, who was born in Glasgow in 1966, was nominated for her installation called Hanging Sculpture, which was presented as part of Manifesta 15 in Barcelona last year. She was also chosen for her work in “Conversations,” a group show at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery in 2024.
She makes sculptures from vibrant streams of repurposed fabric and other materials and large swirling abstract drawings. The prize jury, comprising independent curator Andrew Bonacina, Priyesh Mistry, associate curator of modern and contemporary projects at London’s National Gallery, and Hadba Rashid, senior curator of modern and contemporary art at the Fitzwilliam Museum, said Kalu has a “unique command of material, color, and gesture.” The jury also praised her “highly attuned responses to architectural space.”
At the presser, Lackey said the work of photographer, poet, and writer Matić explores “race, gender, class, and nationhood.” They were shortlisted for their solo show “As Opposed to the Truth” at CCA Berlin. It included highly personal photos of the artist’s family and friends in stacked frames, paired with sound, banners, and installation. In a statement, Matić said the exhibition is about people “holding on to one another, caring for each other, and learning to live with vulnerability.”
Sami, born in 1984, hails from Baghdad but fled as a refugee during the Iraq War. He was nominated for his exhibition, “After the Storm,” at Blenheim Palace. The jury said it was moved by his “powerful representation” of conflict and exile.
Xa’s installation Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales and Earth Remembers Everything won her the jury’s nod. Her work spans installation, performance, sound, textiles, and painting. She is known for using Korean shamanism and folklore to investigate matrilineal knowledge and diasporic identities.
Many have argued that the Turner Prize has lost some of its luster over the last decade or so, and is a shadow of the former headline-grabbing, controversy-fueling iteration that truly interrogated what should be considered art. Take Hirst’s cows or Tracey Emin’s 1999 entry My Bed (which lost out to Steve McQueen’s film), for example. Love them or loathe them, those works ignited public discourse about British art, and propelled both artists to stardom. The same cannot be said for more recent winners of the prize, many of whom have faded into artistic obscurity.
After the press conference, I asked Shanaz Gulzar, creative director for Bradford City of Culture 2025, if she thought this year’s nominees were safe choices or if they might spark public debate about contemporary art.
“I think the artists themselves, the internationalism of their work, the internationalism of their experiences, who their work is speaking to—I think that’s where the dialogue is, audiences will respond to this,” she told ARTnews.
The winner will be announced December 9 at a ceremony in Bradford. Last year’s winner was Scotland’s Jasleen Kaur, who used a vintage Ford Escort and Iron-Bru soda to reflect her Sikh roots.