The Iraqi artist Mohammed Sami, who grew up under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, has been nominated for the 2025 Turner Prize, which will take place later this year in Bradford as part of the UK City of Culture festival (27 September-22 February 2026). Sami has been nominated alongside Rene Matić, Zadie Xa and Nnena Kalu.
Baghdad-born Sami is nominated for his solo exhibition After the Storm, which was held at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire last year. The show’s paintings were made in response to the grandiose English estate, which is the family seat of the dukes of Marlborough and the birthplace of the wartime prime minister Winston Churchill. The painting Chandelier (2024), which was hung in the Red Drawing Room, references warfare, with the trompe l’oeil image of a chandelier evoking a drone.
At a press briefing, Turner prize judge Priyesh Mistry, associate curator of Modern and contemporary projects at London’s National Gallery, said that Sami “explores the memories of his personal history [focusing on] warfare and migration”.
Meanwhile Peterborough-born Rene Matić explores “race, gender, class and nationhood” in their work, said another judge, Sam Lackey, the director of the Liverpool Biennial. In the show As Opposed to the Truth at the CCA Berlin, Matić showed Untitled (No Place for Violence, 2024), which according to the artist, seeks to “embarrass the kind of principle of what a flag is supposed to be”.
The work cites Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s reaction to the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last July, stating “there is no place for violence in our democracy.” In an Instagram post, Matić adds: “Backdropped by the global debates around the attacks of 7 October 2023 and the ongoing war against Palestinians, which has so far claimed tens of thousands of lives, the installation points to a deceptive, two-fold logic of Western political rhetoric.” A solo show of Matić’s work opens at Arcadia Missa gallery in London this week (Idols Lovers Mothers Friends, 25 April-3 June)
Scottish-born Nnena Kalu is nominated for her contribution to the Conversations exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Hanging Sculpture 1 to 10 at Manifesta 15 in Barcelona. “The jury commended her unique command of material, colour and gesture and her highly attuned responses to architectural space,” says a statement. Kalu is a learning disabled (neurodivergent) artist, reflecting how the Turner Prize “continues to expand the positions and perspectives it encompasses”, said Lackey.
Zadie Xa was born in 1983 in Vancouver, Canada, and is based in London. She explores folklore and speculative fiction, familial and collective histories, diasporic identity and the climate emergency through painting, sculpture, film and performance, often brought together in fantastical installations. In 2023, she unveiled a major public art piece at Aldgate East station on the London Underground. Xa is nominated for her presentation Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything at the Sharjah Biennial 16.
Asked why the artists are mainly nominated for exhibitions held in institutions outside the UK, Alex Farquharson, Tate Britain director, said that “it is random but it also reflects international interest in UK artists”.
The winner, who will be announced 9 December, will receive £25,000. Each of the other three shortlisted artists will receive £10,000. The charitable foundation set up by Lord Browne of Madingley and the Uggla Family Foundation established by Lance Uggla—a trustee of the Tate Foundation—are again exhibition sponsors. The shortlist was announced on the 250th anniversary of JMW Turner’s birthday.
- Turner Prize, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, 27 Sep 2025–22 Feb 2026
