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...
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Image Credits:
Lead: Nnena Kalu. Photo courtesy of the Artist and ActionSpace.
All other images as credited in photo captions.