In a landmark moment for the United Kingdom's contemporary art scene, Nnena Kalu has secured the 2025 Turner Prize, marking the first time an artist with a learning disability has taken home Britain's most coveted art award. The announcement, made on December 9 during an exuberant ceremony in Bradford—this year’s designated City of Culture—has sent ripples across the art world and beyond, sparking conversations about inclusion, merit, and the evolving definition of artistic excellence.
Kalu, 59, was born in Glasgow to Nigerian parents and has lived and worked in London for decades. Her artistic journey has been anything but conventional. For the past 25 years, she has been an artist-in-residence at ActionSpace, a London-based organization dedicated to supporting artists with disabilities. Over the years, her unique process-driven practice—wrapping, coiling, and knotting materials like fabric, rope, and even VHS tape around tubes and frameworks—has evolved into a signature style that is both improvisational and deeply rhythmic. These gestures are echoed in her drawings, where swirling, tornado-like forms rendered in pen, graphite, and pastels create a visual language all her own.
The 2025 Turner Prize, which comes with a £25,000 (approximately $33,000) cash award, was presented to Kalu for her body of work, including pieces originally shown in two major exhibitions last year: “Drawing 21” at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the vibrant installation “Hanging Sculpture 1 to 10” at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona. Both works are currently part of a special Turner Prize exhibition at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, where they will remain on view alongside those of the three other shortlisted artists—Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa—until February 22, 2026. Each runner-up will receive £10,000 (about $13,300), as reported by the BBC.
For Kalu, whose career has been marked by both perseverance and innovation, the Turner Prize is more than an individual accolade. It is a triumph over longstanding barriers within the art establishment. Charlotte Hollinshead, head of artist development at ActionSpace and Kalu’s artistic facilitator for over two decades, spoke on the artist’s behalf at the ceremony, given Kalu’s limited verbal communication. Addressing the audience, Hollinshead declared, “This is a major, major moment for a lot of people. It’s seismic. It’s broken a very stubborn glass ceiling.” She continued, “Nnena has faced an incredible amount of discrimination, which continues to this day, so hopefully this award smashes that prejudice away.”
The significance of Kalu’s win was not lost on the Turner Prize jury, chaired by Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson. He emphasized that the decision was based purely on the “quality and uniqueness” of Kalu’s abstract practice. “The result wasn’t about wanting, first and foremost, to give the prize to Nnena as a neurodiverse artist. That wasn’t a driving factor,” Farquharson explained to BBC News. “It was an interest in, and a real belief in, the quality and uniqueness of her practice, which is inseparable from who she is.” He added that the award represents a “toppling of the wall” between disabled and non-disabled artists, describing it as “trailblazing.”
Kalu’s sculptures, which have drawn comparisons to nests and cocoons, are constructed from found and repurposed materials—ribbons, string, card, parcel tape, cling film, plastic sheeting, and, most distinctively, magnetic tape from old VHS cassettes. These tactile, cocoon-like forms are often suspended in space, their swirling colors and textures inviting viewers to move around and engage with them physically. According to Farquharson, “They’re suspended in the space that you’re in, like brightly colored rocks or creatures. Although there are no figurative features at all, they appear to be communing among themselves and with you. The use of materials is highly unusual, including video tape that gets wrapped round and round. The colors and the lines the materials make are very like brush marks translated into three dimensions. They’re very gestural, they’re very expressive, they’re very compelling.”
On paper, Kalu’s drawings are equally mesmerizing—vortices and swirling forms that critics have described as “tornado-like” and “beautifully intricate.” These sets of near-identical shapes, often rendered in bold colors, reflect the same process-driven repetition that defines her sculptural work. Charlotte Hollinshead, in a video interview for Tate, described Kalu’s approach: “So much of [Kalu’s] work is about this continuous line. She wants to take that line on a really long journey and she wants to build it and build it and shape it.”
Kalu’s rise to prominence has been gradual. Despite working as a resident artist with ActionSpace since 1999, her work was not always embraced by the mainstream art world. “When Nnena first began working with Action Space in 1999, the art world was not interested. Her work wasn’t respected, not seen, and certainly wasn’t regarded as cool,” Hollinshead reflected at the ceremony. That began to change in recent years, with institutional exhibitions starting in 2016 and her first solo international museum show, “Creations of Care,” at Kunsthall Stavanger in Norway in 2025. Her first commercial gallery exhibition followed at Arcadia Missa in London in 2024.
The Turner Prize itself has a storied and sometimes controversial history since its founding in 1984. It is awarded annually to an artist born or working in the UK for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work over the previous year. The prize gained particular notoriety in the 1990s for its association with the Young British Artists (YBAs), including luminaries like Damien Hirst, Chris Ofili, and Rachel Whiteread. Past winners have included Steve McQueen, Lubaina Himid, Gilbert & George, Wolfgang Tillmans, Grayson Perry, and Jasleen Kaur, among others.
For Bradford, hosting the Turner Prize ceremony and exhibition has been a point of civic pride, underscoring the city’s role as a burgeoning center for culture and the arts in 2025. The award ceremony was held at Bradford Grammar School, the alma mater of renowned artist David Hockney, lending a sense of local heritage to the proceedings.
The jury for this year’s prize included Sam Lackey (Liverpool Biennial director), Priyesh Mistry (associate curator at the National Gallery), Habda Rashid (senior curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum), and independent curator Andrew Bonacina, with Farquharson as chair. Their deliberations, which reportedly lasted several hours, focused on the “sheer quality and verve and beauty” of Kalu’s work, as Farquharson put it to The New York Times.
As the exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery continues through February, Kalu’s win is being celebrated not only as a personal achievement but as a watershed moment for neurodiverse artists and the broader creative community. In the words of Hollinshead: “It’s wonderful she’s finally getting the recognition she rightly, rightly deserves.”
Kalu’s journey—marked by perseverance, innovation, and a refusal to be defined by limitations—has not only earned her Britain’s most prestigious art prize but has also helped to redraw the boundaries of who gets to be seen, heard, and celebrated in the world of contemporary art.
