Blog | COMBAT ART REVIEW

Nnena Kalu Wins the Turner Prize 2025: Gesture, Material and Presence in Contemporary Art

The Turner Prize 2025 has been awarded to Nnena Kalu, one of the most intense and distinctive voices in contemporary British art.

_2nd_Photo Michael e. Smith — Turner Prize 2025. Photo (c) James Speakman_PA Media Assignments

The announcement was made during a public ceremony at Bradford Grammar School, hosted by Steven Frayne, widely known as Dynamo, as part of Bradford UK City of Culture 2025 and broadcast live on BBC News. The winner receives £25,000, while the other shortlisted artists – Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa – each receive £10,000.

The jury highlighted the quality and boldness of all four presentations, which together offer a complex and multifaceted picture of contemporary art today. Painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound and photography coexist in diverse practices, united by a strong formal and conceptual awareness. The Turner Prize 2025 exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford has already attracted over 34,000 visitors, confirming strong public engagement.

Nnena Kalu’s practice stood out for its powerful physical presence. She creates hanging sculptures using heterogeneous materials – repurposed fabrics, ropes, parcel tape, plastic film, paper and VHS tape reels – assembled into enveloping forms reminiscent of nests or cocoons. Alongside the sculptures, Kalu presents large abstract drawings built through repeated, vigorous and rhythmic gestures that generate dense vortices and spirals. The jury praised her ability to translate expressive gesture into works of striking visual and spatial impact, noting her refined control of scale, colour and composition.

Michael E. Smith, ph. Carlo Favero — Drawing 12, 2021, Nnena Kalu. Installation view at Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, ActionSpace, London and Arcadia Missa, London. Photo © David Levene

Born in Glasgow in 1966 and active for over two decades in London, where she is a resident artist with ActionSpace at Studio Voltaire, Kalu has developed a coherent and unmistakable practice, often realised directly within the exhibition space. Her works do not merely occupy space but activate it, establishing a dynamic dialogue between body, material and environment.

Founded in 1984 and named after J.M.W. Turner, the prize remains one of the most important platforms for observing developments in British contemporary art. In 2025, the Turner Prize once again confirms its role as a critical arena for practices that engage the present with both radicality and sensitivity. With Nnena Kalu’s victory, the prize recognises an artistic vision that combines emotional intensity and formal rigour, transforming humble materials into powerful structures that resonate in both memory and space.

Turner Prize 2025

27 September 2025 to 22 February 2026

Beyond Borders: Identity — Catalogue Presentation at MACRO

On 17 December 2025, from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm, the Auditorium of MACRO will host the presentation of the catalogue Beyond Borders: Identity, published by Quodlibet.

The event marks a key moment of reflection and restitution for a project developed to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Farnesina Collection of Contemporary Art and shaped through a travelling exhibition hosted by several Italian Cultural Institutes worldwide.

More than a conventional exhibition catalogue, Beyond Borders: Identity positions itself as an open space for reflection on the urgencies of the present. The volume addresses central issues of our time — identity, memory, and coexistence between human beings and nature — questioning the role of art in an era marked by environmental crises, globalisation and profound social transformations. Rather than offering definitive answers, the project opens up a dialogue meant to remain active, generating new interpretations and connections.

Like the exhibition from which it originates, the book moves beyond geographical and symbolic boundaries, expanding its scope through critical contributions and institutional perspectives that strengthen the project’s theoretical framework. The catalogue thus becomes a parallel site of thought, deepening the artists’ research and extending its relevance beyond the temporal limits of the exhibition.

Moderated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini, curator of both the volume and the project, the presentation is conceived as a continuous dialogue between word and gesture, theory and artistic practice. The first part features contributions by Marco Maria Cerbo, Head of the Unit for the Coordination of Italian Cultural Institutes, Cecilia Canziani, art critic and historian, and Giuseppe Garrera, art historian and critic. Authors of essays included in the catalogue, they will reflect on art’s capacity to function as a space of translation, relationship and connection across different languages and contexts.

The core of the event unfolds in the second part, dedicated to the artists. In keeping with the spirit of the travelling exhibition, the auditorium becomes a living, participatory environment where critical discourse meets artistic action. Tomaso Binga, Elena Bellantoni, Rä Di Martino, Paola Gandolfi, Silvia Giambrone, Elisa Montessori and Agnese Purgatorio will activate short performances, readings and gestures, embodying their works and establishing a direct relationship with the audience.

Museo MACRO

Via Nizza, 138, Roma

Date

17 Dicembre

Michael E. Smith at Palazzo Bentivoglio: C C and the Tension of Sculptural Absence

From 30 January to 26 April 2026, Palazzo Bentivoglio in Bologna hosts C C, the solo exhibition of Michael E. Smith, one of the most radical and influential American artists of his generation.

Curated by Simone Menegoi and Tommaso Pasquali, the exhibition unfolds in the underground spaces of the palace, which Smith transforms into an essential, taut and deeply immersive environment. Admission is free, underscoring the project’s commitment to fostering a direct relationship between artistic research and the public.

For more than twenty years, Michael E. Smith has been redefining the boundaries of sculpture and installation through a practice that moves between minimalism and residue, presence and absence, matter and silence. His works often originate from found materials, industrial waste and salvaged objects—elements that carry traces of use, consumption and abandonment. Placed within space with surgical precision, these fragments generate installations of strong emotional impact, in which the everyday appears both fragile and threatening.

Each of Smith’s exhibitions is conceived as a unique, unrepeatable experience. Objects, architecture and light operate in unison, transforming the exhibition space into a living body charged with constant tension. Emptiness, waiting and silence become fundamental compositional tools: it is through subtraction that the artist concentrates meaning, compelling the viewer toward a heightened, almost alert mode of perception.

Raised in post-industrial Detroit, Smith translates a memory shaped by industrial decline and urban precarity into sculptural form. His works offer an uneasy reflection on the fate of objects and places, and on their relationship with human time. In C C, this research encounters a site dense with history: the underground spaces of Palazzo Bentivoglio, with their material and symbolic stratifications, become a new field of exploration.

As the curators note, after challenging the neutrality of the white cube, Smith arrives at a space where historical layering and material complexity become an unexpected and indispensable starting point. The dialogue with the site has triggered a network of intimate resonances for the artist, allowing memories tied to an unpublished family story to surface, further intensifying the exhibition’s atmosphere.

Palazzo Bentivoglio

via del Borgo di San Pietro 1, Bologna

Date

30 gennaio – 26 aprile 2026

Return to the home page

Back to home page