One of the world’s most prestigious art prizes has been awarded to a 59-year-old Glaswegian artist with autism and learning disabilities. Honoured by the 2025 Turner Prize for what the judges called her “bold and compelling” work, Nnena Kalu becomes the “first learning-disabled artist to be nominated” for the prize, “let alone win it”, said art critic Mark Hudson in The Independent.
Kalu’s large, hanging, cocoon-like sculptures, made from old VHS tape, rope and fabric, and her bright, swirling “vortex” drawings in pen and pastel, beat the work of three other shortlisted artists. Her win “breaks down walls” between “neurotypical and neurodiverse artists”, said Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, chair of this year’s jury.
‘Seismic’ victory
“Kalu’s forms come at you with their almost alien unknowable presence,” said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. You become entangled in the work’s “roaring, spilling, snaggling details” and can’t help but wonder about your “own boundaries, the body’s beginnings and its endings”.
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Her work is “so embodied, so sensuous”, it “is not reducible to anything we might call a technique”. It is “the product of drive and urgency and intent”. Her own verbal communication is limited, so her work “has to speak for itself” – and it has quite a bit to say.
“Much has been made, and rightly so,” of Kalu’s win but her victory is “seismic” beyond reasons of equality and diversity, said The Independent’s Hudson. Her work places an emphasis “on the visual, tactile and experiential in art – values that have lost primacy in recent years”. The recognition of her artistry “seems to herald the welcome return of artists physically making things”.
‘Maddening’ decision
Kalu’s “triumph will be hailed as a watershed moment for Britain’s disabled community”, but the judges’ “decision is also maddening”, said art critic Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The shortlisted Mohammed Sami, who “makes vast, haunting contemporary history paintings, like half-remembered nightmares”, will “feel that he’s been cheated”.
Her “lumpy sculpture, fashioned from brightly coloured gaffer tape and discarded bubble wrap”, was “up there with the worst art” ever nominated for the Turner Prize, Waldemar Januszczak, art critic of The Sunday Times, said on his website in October.
Maybe “it wouldn’t be the Turner Prize without a soupçon – or rather a bucketful – of provocation”, said The Telegraph’s Sooke. But “did the jury really consider her the strongest artist” on the shortlist? Farquharson, the jury’s chair, said the decision “wasn’t about wanting, first and foremost, to give the prize to Nnena as a neurodiverse artist”. It was “a real belief in the quality and uniqueness of her practice, which is inseparable from who she is”.
Ultimately, Kalu’s work goes “over and above the disability issues surrounding her win”, said Hudson in The Independent. It serves as a reminder that “no matter how much art may illuminate our perspectives on history, politics, human relationships and the natural world, the visual and the sensual come first”. Kalu “demonstrates that lesson against all odds”.
