Nnena Kalu has won the 2025 Turner prize for her colourful drawings and sculptures made from found fabric and VHS tape, becoming the first artist with a learning disability to take home the £25,000 prize.
Alex Farquharson, chair of the jury and director of Tate Britain, said the win by the British-Nigerian represented a watershed moment for the international art world.
“Nnena’s work was very much selected for its quality but given she’s a neurodiverse artist, given her verbal communication is limited, she’s someone who previously would have been on the outside,” he said.
“[Her win] begins to erase that border between the neurotypical and neurodiverse artist. You suddenly become aware that actually it’s been a boundary around our history, and around contemporary art. But that boundary is dissolving.”
Charlotte Hollinshead, Kalu’s studio manager and artistic facilitator, made a winner’s speech on her behalf. She said: “Nnena has faced an incredible amount of discrimination, which continued to this day, so hopefully this award helps to smash the prejudice away.”
Kalu wore a rosette which read “Idol, Legend, Winner, Whatever”, which was something a participant in a workshop had said about the artist.
Kalu’s drawings and sculptures, described by the Guardian art critic Eddy Frankel as “huge cocoons wrapped into massive, tight, twisting, ultra-colourful knots”, impressed the judging panel, who were torn in a year when nearly all the artists were tipped as potential winners.
Nnena Kalu’s drawings and sculptures have been described as ‘huge cocoons wrapped into massive, tight, twisting, ultra-colourful knots’. Photograph: PA Images/Alamy Live News
The Turner prize, regarded as one of the art world’s most prestigious awards, is presented to an artist born or working in Britain for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work over the previous year.
The 2025 nominees were widely seen as artists who all seemed to speak to Britain’s contemporary times, where identity and the concept of belonging are in flux. The critical response to the work was typically passionate and divided.
The Guardian’s Adrian Searle praised the show, but picked Kalu as the standout artist. Her work is constructed from adhesive tape, clingfilm, repurposed plastics, fabrics, cable ties and VHS tape which is bound up into different forms.
Searle said Kalu, an autistic artist with learning disabilities and limited verbal communication, created work that was “irreducible” and reminiscent of the US artist Judith Scott and the German artist Hanne Darboven.
“There’s no fudging,” he wrote. “Kalu deserves to win this year’s Turner prize.” His comments proved prophetic but other critics felt similarly passionately about other artists.
The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke singled out the “violent” work of Mohammed Sami, an artist who began his career painting official portraits of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. He picked out his painting, The Hunter’s Return, writing that the “colossal, 19ft-wide vision of combat forces, in which green lasers slice through a thick orange dust storm”, was so unnerving that, “surely, the prize must go to him”.
The Times’ Nancy Durrant also picked Sami as 2025’s best work. “Evocative, allusive and fantastically well executed, these are stunning works that reward lengthy contemplation,” she wrote.
Work by Rene Matić, whose black dolls represented ‘contested ideas of nationhood and belonging’. Photograph: Adam Vaughan/EPA
Peterborough’s Rene Matić was the second youngest-ever nominee, and their work featured an installation where the voices of Nina Simone and bell hooks drifted over the room.
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Matić, the only photographer on the shortlist, interspersed images from their own life, including their collection of black dolls and snapshots from nights out, which represented “contested ideas of nationhood and belonging” or as they put it, an “obsession with understanding Britishness, or not understanding it”.
The Vancouver-born Korean artist Zadie Xa created paintings featuring folkloric Korean figures, skeletal musicians, swimming dolphins, passing squid and sea-turtles. Searle was not as impressed with this work, writing that “this woozy, overwrought and overthought exercise in luxury brand shamanism is as excessive as it is unnecessary”.
Zadie Xa’s work featured folkloric Korean figures. Photograph: Andrew Benge/Getty Images
The award was presented at a ceremony at Bradford grammar school, a short walk from Cartwright Hall where this year’s competition is being held as part of Bradford’s City of Culture. The prize headed back out on the road after last year’s ceremony at Tate Britain, its spiritual home.
At Cartwright Hall each of the nominees was given a separate room, with the work displayed across two floors of the building. The award was given out by Steven Frayne AKA Dynamo.
Kalu was born in Glasgow in 1966 to Nigerian parents, but moved at a young age to Wandsworth in London. She first began practising art at the Hill House day centre in Tooting, south London in the late 1980s. She now has her studio at ActionSpace in Clapham, a charity that provides space and help to learning disabled artists.
Her trajectory has been meteoric. In 2016, she showed alongside contemporary artists including Laure Prouvost in Belgium; then took part in Glasgow International two years later. Her first commercial gallery show was last year, and in 2025 her first major institutional exhibition opened at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger.
Kalu made history by winning the award, with the disability charity Sense calling her nomination, “richly deserved and long overdue”.
Farquharson added: “The drawings have this beautiful visual, subtle formal quality, while the sculptures look like vortexes or whirlpools and draw you in. They are these amazingly compelling things, which draw you in, give you joy and that keep you coming back.”
