The Turner Prize 2025: Fabric in Focus
This December, the Turner Prize will be awarded in Bradford for the first time, with Cartwright Hall Art Gallery hosting the exhibition as part of Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture. The timing is poignant: 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of JMW Turner’s birth, a painter who pushed at the edges of representation. Fittingly, this year’s shortlist continues that radical spirit — and tellingly, each artist engages with textiles as material, metaphor, or memory.
Nnena Kalu installation view - Manifesta 15, Barcelona, 2024. Photo Credit: Ivan Erofeev.
At the centre of this year’s shortlist is Nnena Kalu, whose towering hanging sculptures have electrified audiences from Liverpool to Barcelona. Born in Glasgow to Nigerian parents, Kalu has worked with ActionSpace since 1999, an organisation that supports artists with learning disabilities. Her practice is rooted in repetition and instinct, and yet its results are monumental — bundles of time, labour, and persistence. Recognition has come late: only in recent years has her work reached international stages, from the 2023 Liverpool Biennial to Manifesta 15 in Barcelona. Her Turner Prize nomination is not just a personal milestone but a broader invitation to rethink who contemporary art chooses to elevate, and how sustained, process-driven work can embody resilience and vision.
Nnena Kalu’s work at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger. Photograph- Erik Sæter Jørgensen.
Kalu’s sculptures are built from tightly packed cocoons of fabric, paper, cellophane and spooled VHS tape, layered through a relentless process of wrapping and binding. They swell into bulbous, colourful knots, heavy with the muscle memory of their making. Suspended overhead, they impose and embrace at once, their chrysalis-like forms caught between fragility and force. Each cocoon carries the trace of her gestures, her insistence on return, and her refusal to let form settle. In her hands, textiles are not decorative but urgent: raw matter transformed into a record of presence.
The wider shortlist reveals a shared turn to fabric. René Matić, a British artist and writer whose work spans photography, film and sculpture, unfurls cloth into flags for countries that do not exist but bodies that do—banners of belonging and resistance, rooted in explorations of identity and diaspora.
Installation view, Arcadia, Bold Tendencies, London, UK (2021)
Mohammed Sami, an Iraqi-born painter now based in London, works in paint yet lingers on garments: coats, shirts and fabrics that remain as silent witnesses to exile and conflict, conjuring absence through the textures of the everyday.
After the Storm, Mohammed Sami. Blenheim Palace, 2024.
Zadie Xa, a Canadian artist of Korean descent living in London, was nominated for an installation of sound, sculpture and painting, yet also works extensively in textiles, creating ornate patch-worked garments that blur armour, ritual dress and shamanic costume, drawing on Korean folklore and diasporic memory.
Zadie Xa - Installation image from House Gods, Animal Guides, and Five Ways 2 Forgiveness at the Whitechapel Gallery, 2022. Photo by Andy Keate.
That all four artists engage in textiles is no coincidence. Cloth, once sidelined as “craft,” has become central to contemporary art precisely because it is so bound to human life. Worn close to the skin, traded across continents, stitched in both tenderness and protest, fabric holds memory and meaning with uncommon intimacy. Increasingly, artists use it to question identity, to map migration, to honour labour and care.
As the Turner Prize arrives in Bradford, textiles appear as the connective thread — no longer mere backdrop but protagonist, carrying the persistence of making and the radical potential of art itself.
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Further Information:
The Turner Prize 2025 exhibition is open now until 22 February 2026 at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford. Free tickets can be booked online.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Nnena Kalu. Photo courtesy of the Artist and ActionSpace.
All other images as credited in photo captions.