Nnena Kalu’s Turner Prize win in 2025 has sent ripples through the British art world, marking a profound moment of recognition for both the artist herself and the broader community of learning disabled creatives. Announced at a ceremony in Bradford—this year’s UK City of Culture—the award not only celebrates Kalu’s distinctive art but also challenges longstanding prejudices within the cultural sector.
At 59, Kalu becomes the first artist with a learning disability to claim Britain’s most prestigious visual arts prize. Her journey to this milestone has been anything but conventional. Born in Glasgow in 1966 and based in London, Kalu has been a resident artist at ActionSpace’s studio since 1999, an organization dedicated to supporting learning disabled artists. For years, her work thrived outside the mainstream, quietly accumulating power and presence in a field that often overlooked such voices.
The Turner Prize jury, chaired by Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, praised Kalu’s “bold and compelling work,” highlighting the “powerful presence” of her pieces. Her art—whether in the form of dense, coiled bundles of fabric, rope, VHS tape, and cling film, or in looping, meditative drawings—commands attention through a unique language of accumulation and repetition. As The Associated Press reported, her vividly colored, cocoon-like sculptures were first displayed amid the concrete pillars of a disused power station in Barcelona, while her graphite-and-pen drawing, Drawing 21, was part of a group exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool earlier this year.
Two works were specifically considered for the prize: Hanging Sculpture 1-10, commissioned by Manifesta in 2024, and Drawing 21. The sculptures, wrapped and layered into organic forms, seem to hang between sculpture, performance, and raw force, while her drawings are built through relentless, circular motion—tracing what feels like the internal rhythm of breath or insistence. The jury admired her “confidence of material language,” noting the way her abstractions command space without resorting to theatrics.
Kalu’s career has unfolded alongside ActionSpace, and her longtime studio manager, Charlotte Hollinshead, accepted the Turner Prize on her behalf. Hollinshead, who has worked with Kalu for 25 years, summed up the emotion of the night: “This is a major, major moment for a lot of people. It’s seismic. It’s broken a very stubborn glass ceiling.” She added, “Nnena’s career reflects the long, often very frustrating journey we’ve been on together to challenge people’s preconceptions about differently abled artists, but especially learning disabled artists, an important creative community that is so undervalued. When Nnena first began working with ActionSpace in 1999 the art world was not interested. Her work wasn't respected, not seen, and certainly wasn't regarded as cool. Nnena has faced an incredible amount of discrimination, which continues to this day. Hopefully this award smashes that prejudice away.” (Museums Journal)
Kalu is autistic and has limited verbal communication, but she’s known for her energetic working process—often creating while playing loud disco music. Her practice is unbothered by art-world theatrics and is tender to the intelligence of repetition. According to Art Review, her installations “thrum with the residue of making: stretched tape, compressed bundles, surfaces buffeted into surprising vulnerability.” It’s a politics of presence, built from the weight of things touched and retouched until they hum with life and meaning.
The Turner Prize, established in 1984 and named after the 19th-century painter J.M.W. Turner, has a history of sparking debate about the value and accessibility of contemporary art. Past winners like Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry have pushed boundaries and courted controversy. This year, however, the focus shifted to representation and inclusion. As Alex Farquharson noted, Kalu’s win “begins to erase [the] 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.”
The 2025 shortlist included Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa, each receiving £10,000, while Kalu took home the £25,000 prize. Their works are all on display at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery until February 22, 2026—a show that has already attracted 34,000 visitors, according to Museums Journal. The exhibition is co-curated by Jill Iredale, Michael Richmond, and Sophie Bullen, highlighting the collaborative nature of this year’s cultural celebrations in Bradford.
Kalu’s recognition comes at a time when the UK’s visual arts sector is making concerted efforts to support disabled artists. Initiatives like We Contain Multitudes—a three-year project between the Collective gallery in Edinburgh, Dundee Contemporary Arts, and Lux Scotland—are “committed to questioning the institutional ableism in the sector and to imagining a future in which disabled artists and arts professionals have increased access to opportunities, are visible, and their expertise and experiences are truly valued.” Other recent exhibitions, such as Beyond the Visual at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and Design and Disability at the Victoria and Albert Museum, are similarly expanding the conversation around inclusion, access, and artistic value.
Kalu’s victory is more than a personal milestone; it’s a signal of shifting attitudes within the art establishment. Her abstractions, described by the Turner jury as lively translations of expressive gesture into captivating sculpture and drawing, invite viewers into an environment charged with texture, gravity, and persistence. Her work, as seen in the Turner Prize exhibition at Cartwright Hall, forms a living, breathing environment—an ecosystem of labor, resilience, and creative insistence.
The Turner Prize has often gravitated toward political spectacle or conceptual provocation, but Kalu’s art offers something different: a grounded, tactile experience that asserts meaning can arise from repetition, from doing something again and again until it becomes unmistakably your own. This year’s award, then, is not only a celebration of Kalu’s singular vision but also a widening of the field—an expansion of who gets to be seen and how powerfully.
With the next Turner Prize exhibition set for Mima in Middlesbrough and Tate St Ives in 2027, the impact of Kalu’s win is likely to reverberate for years to come. Her moment in the spotlight stands as both a milestone for representation and a testament to the profound resonance of art made with persistence, care, and unapologetic individuality.
