Turner Prize show opens in Bradford’s Cartwright Hall

The 2025 Turner Prize exhibition has opened at Cartwright Hall in Bradford, showcasing works from the four shortlisted artists – Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, Nnena Kalu and Zadie Xa.

This is the first time that the annual art prize has been held in West Yorkshire and coincides with Bradford 2025 City of Culture.

The free exhibition runs at Cartwright Hall until 22 February 2026, with the winner of the £25,000 prize announced on 9 December at nearby Bradford Grammar School, where the artist David Hockney was educated.

The curators of the exhibition, Jill Iredale from Bradford Museums & Galleries and Michael Richmond from Yorkshire Contemporary, have created dedicated rooms for each of the four shortlisted artists across the civic art gallery.

Speaking at the press opening of the exhibition, the director of Tate Liverpool Helen Legg said the prize gave “communities around the country [the] opportunity to witness new developments in contemporary art right on their doorsteps”.

And Shanaz Gulzar, the creative director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, said: “The Turner Prize is an important part of our offer, and an opportunity for us to show ourselves and show itself and demonstrate nationally and internationally what it means to be City of Culture.”

Turner Prize 2025 Shortlisted Artists

Rene Matić uses photography along with sculpture, textiles, sound, moving image and writing to reflect on identity, community and love.Their work often captures scenes and snippets from everyday life, subcultures and their own personal background to ask questions about race, gender, class and nationality. Matić was nominated for their solo exhibition As Opposed to the Truth at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Berlin. Created amid a backdrop of right-wing populism, violence and political hypocrisy, Matić’s Turner Prize presentation explores how despite this, people can ‘hold on to one another, care for each other, and learn to live with vulnerability,' as they explain.

In the centre of the room hangs a white flag containing the words ‘no place’ and ‘for violence’. The exhibition also features Restoration, a growing collection of antique black dolls salvaged by the artist, as well as the photo series Feelings Wheel and sound installation 365 which bring together overlapping imagery and sounds referencing protest, parties and relationships.

Photo credit: Rene Matić By Diana Pfammatter

Mohammed Sami’s practice underscores how mnemonic processes often surface belatedly. In his paintings, the relationship between signifier and signified becomes an active agent. By deliberately omitting human figures and focusing instead on landscapes, interiors, and still-lifes, he displaces direct representation of war and conflict, challenging the cliché of memory as if it were replaying like a videotape. Through this strategy, metaphor and ambiguity allow his paintings to articulate conflict without ever depicting it directly.

For his Turner Prize presentation, Sami brings together new paintings that explore the symptoms of war through processes of memory and causality, alongside works from his nominated solo exhibition at Blenheim Palace After the Storm. The setting of that exhibition was significant: built in the 18^th century in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, to commemorate the military triumphs of the Duke of Marlborough, the palace is adorned with art that glorifies warfare and power, a charged backdrop against which Sami’s work stages absence and muteness.

Photo credit: Mohammed Sami By Sarel Jansen

Nnena Kalu creates large-scale abstract drawings and hanging sculptures. Her vividly coloured works are carefully created from repeated lines and wrappings of different materials, making nest or cocoon-like forms. While drawings are made in her studio, sculptures are often finalised on site, with Kalu adapting them to specific spaces.

Kalu was nominated for the inclusion of Drawing 21 in the group exhibition Conversations at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and her works Hanging Sculpture 1-10. Barcelona at Manifesta 15. Kalu’s Turner Prize presentation brings together these sculptures which the artist has reworked on site at Cartwright Hall. To create these works, Kalu begins with a loop or structure that forms a base, around which she wraps, folds and knots brightly coloured streams of repurposed fabric, rope, tape, cling film, paper and VHS tape. Alongside are a selection of drawings consisting of powerful vortexes made with swirling, overlapping lines.

Photo credit: Nnena Kalu. Courtesy Of The Artist And ActionSpace. High Res Landscape

Zadie Xa creates installations that imagine alternative worlds. These immersive environments are conjured from a wide range of sources and research interests, including spirituality, ancestry, and cultural traditions, particularly from her own Korean and Canadian background.

Xa was nominated for her solo presentation Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything in Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates. Her presentation at Carwright Hall Art Gallery uses painting, sound, textiles and sculpture to consider links between ocean life, generational grief, Korean shamanism and ghostly spirits. In the centre of the gallery hundreds of shamanic bells hang forming the outline of a shell. Around the edges of the room four more seashells project a soundscape inspired by nature, confessions and the music of Salpuri, a traditional Korean exorcism dance.

The exhibition also includes painted walls depicting a sun and moon in perpetual rise and fall, alongside paintings which echo the Korean practice of bojagi, where scraps of cloth are stitched together to make textiles for wrapping objects, or used in domestic rituals. Scenes of marine life and folk practices appear within these colourful patchworks. Xa’s practice often involves collaboration and she worked closely with artist and longtime collaborator Benito Mayor Vallejo to develop the exhibition design, as well as the mural and sculptural elements of this display.

Photo credit: Zadie Xa By Charles Duprat. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery.