Mirror, Mirror

Walking through Lister Park on my way to Cartwright Hall to see this year’s Turner Prize exhibition, I couldn’t help but think about how underappreciated Bradford is. Every time I venture into a new part of the city for the first time, I’m surprised by how charming Bradford and its buildings are. Cartwright Hall opened in 1904, constructed with funds from local textile industrialist Samuel Cunliffe Lister. The Neo-Baroque, purpose-built gallery is an impressive sight and a great place to host the Turner Prize for its second time in Yorkshire – not least because Bradford was one of the first British local authority museum services to collect works by South Asian and Black artists.

It’s hard to believe a place like Cartwright Hall exists in a city often dubbed by tabloids as one of the worst places to live in the UK. It’s true that Bradford, known for its civic Victorian architecture, suffered massively under incomplete regeneration plans in the 2010s. Prior to the development of the city centre, the ruins of demolished buildings sat abandoned for years – an urban scar that was nicknamed ‘Bradford Hole’. Then, the scrapping of HS2 plans left the city in the lurch yet again. It has had its fair share of bad luck and worse PR. Still, Bradford, the birthplace of David Hockney and the Brontë sisters, has never seemed to lose sight of its capacity for greatness. In 2025, it became the UK City of Culture. As someone born and raised in West Yorkshire, I appreciate every effort to bring world-class art beyond London and within arm’s reach.

The Turner Prize, now in its 41st year, has had its own evolution over the decades. There was the introduction of an age limit in 1991 (it was decreed that nominated artists could be no older than 50), then the removal of the same in 2017. In 2020, there was no official prize awarded due to the pandemic – instead, 10 artists received bursaries of £10,000 each. Then, in 2021, five art collectives were shortlisted for the first time. This year, the shortlist appears to be one of the most expansive to date, with each artist offering something distinct in terms of medium, approach and style.

Glasgow-born multimedia artist Nnena Kalu has created colourful, layered sculptures suspended alongside large-scale, swirling abstract drawings for the exhibition. Rene Matić, at 28, is the second-youngest person ever nominated for the Turner Prize (after Damien Hirst, who won in 1995) and presents intimate and candid photography of life in Britain, displayed alongside a monumental flag. Mohammed Sami, born in Baghdad, showcases major paintings of landscapes and interiors haunted by memory, conflict and absence. Meanwhile, Vancouver-born artist Zadie Xa offers a vibrant installation of ethereal paintings, bells and shells that explores ecology, mythology and her Korean ancestry.

Vancouver-born Korean artist Zadie Xa's practice combines sculpture, painting, light, sound, video and performance to create immersive, multisensory landscapes informed by her Korean heritage, as well as traditional folk tales, mythology, interspecies communication and diasporic realities. She was nominated for her installation Moonlight Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything 2025 shown at Sharjah Biennial 16, which she has recreated at Cartwright Hall. Stepping into her installation is like entering an alternative realm.

The first thing you notice is the floor. It is metallic gold, shiny and reflective. At the centre of the display are hundreds of brass shamanic bells hanging from the ceiling. In Korean culture, these bells can attract or repel spirits. They tinkle and glisten above an iridescent, octagonal podium that bounces with colour.

The walls are painted deep red, purple and green, reminiscent of both the horizon and the sea. Xa has long been concerned with ecology, science fiction and ancient religions, and her paintings here dive deep into these same themes. Geometric patchwork pieces depict marine life and folk practices, blending traditional Korean quilting techniques known as bojagi with American modernist methods. The painting La Danse Macabre 2024 is the star of the show. It’s a wide, oceanic epic featuring skeletons, whales and figures, imagining a ‘conversation between a shaman, human dancers, and sea creatures’. It is painted in silky pastel tones, giving it a dreamlike quality.

Xa seems intent on transporting viewers not just to another world but to another state of mind. Sound pours from seashells hanging from the ceiling, bringing a point of meditation to the display – a place to pause and tune in. The shells emit sounds of the sea, nature, heavy machinery alluding to environmental extraction and the music of Salpuri, a traditional Korean exorcism dance intended to expel evil spirits. They also play recordings of American feminist authors such as Octavia E Butler, Ursula K Le Guin and Alice Walker. Xa’s use of sound emphasises transmission and deep listening – how sound can act as a bridge between worlds, timelines and even species.

Xa’s display at Cartwright Hall is expansive and curious, attempting to provide new ways of engaging with the future by evoking the past. Her devotion to her Korean ancestors and her affinities with myth-making create an opportune space for this kind of experimental storytelling. It wouldn’t be a surprise if her goal of fusing sound, textile, and painting was to elicit a transcendental experience. Certainly, children from a local primary school visiting the galleries at the same time seemed to enjoy the vertigo induced by walking across Xa’s mirrored floor. This is a coalition of symbolism, speculative fiction, futurism and history, and Xa’s concerns are beyond beauty: they are dialogue, memory, nature and imagination.

As Union and St George flags pervade British streets in a wave of anti-immigration hysteria, a different kind of banner hangs from the ceiling in the centre of Rene Matić’s display at Cartwright Hall. The massive white flag reads ‘No Place’ on one side and ‘For Violence’ on the other. This imposing work reaches almost from floor to ceiling, forcing you to stop and take it in. Matić, who was born in Peterborough and is of English, St Lucian and Irish heritage, has long been interested in the power of flags. Matić incorporates them heavily in their practice and often inscribes them with phrases that feel like calls to action, such as ‘Dance with me’ and ‘Let me lead’.

This particular flag quotes Joe Biden and Barack Obama’s words in response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in July 2024, underscoring their hypocrisy given their complicity in Israel’s war on Gaza. The flag, in one sense, is a visual symbol of the contradictions of people in power. However, it could also be read as the inverse of what the St George flag or any national flag represents. ‘No place’ pledges no allegiance or loyalty to a particular state, which makes even more sense when you consider that Matić photographs the people they relate to in terms of race, class, age, gender and sexuality – rather than geography.

That said, Matić’s interest in Britishness is explicit: a fascination with ideas of belonging and symbols of pride is omnipresent throughout their work Feelings Wheel 2022–25, which spirals around the edge of the gallery. Photographs of varying size overlap one another and lean in acrylic frames against the wall. Here are pictures of flags, parties, pro-Palestine protests, lovers kissing, shop fronts and queer communities. The series of intimate and tender images provides a window into British life, with all its cracks and complexities, against a backdrop of rising far-right support in the UK. Matić’s diaristic images show how identity can form outside of rigid ideologies. Through making private worlds public alongside nationalist iconology, the artist leans into the feminist idea that the personal is political.

The work Restoration 2022–25 showcases a collection of broken and discarded antique Black dolls. They sit on shelves – some without clothes, some dressed – longing to be held. In the 1960s, after the Watts Uprising in Los Angeles (motivated by calls to end police brutality), companies began to mass produce ‘ethnically correct’ dolls to offer Black children toys that better reflected them. Matić began collecting these dolls while reflecting on their father’s fraught early years, after he was abandoned as a child in Peterborough. The inclusion of these dolls seems to represent an opportunity to extend love and care to Matić’s father while also engaging with a period of deep societal and racial unrest that doesn’t feel all that dissimilar to now.

Mohammed Sami's large canvases remind you why painting will always be one of the most powerful and evocative art forms. The London-based artist, who was born in Baghdad in 1984, has been nominated for his solo exhibition After the Storm at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire in 2024. For the exhibition, Sami developed a new body of work hung alongside and inspired by Blenheim Palace’s collection of portraiture and narrative artworks, and the building’s history, which is inextricably tied to war. The palace was originally built in recognition of the First Duke of Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704 – and has since become known as the birthplace of Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister during the Second World War. Sami’s semi-abstract work reckons with this history through a series of paintings that explore memory and conflict.

Using a mix of still life, landscapes and interiors, Sami creates work that occupies the space between what is portrayed and what is perceived, while also using composition to create suspense. Sami’s eerie paintings of landscapes or domestic scenes are charged with politics and violence, specifically in relation to the Iraq conflict, which Sami experienced first-hand. Still, his work avoids voyeurism of bloodshed and suffering – what is present in the paintings is as important as what isn’t. In The Grinder 2023, for instance, you see an aerial view of a table with four empty green seats. Looming over them is the shadow of what could be a ceiling fan or helicopter blades. It’s impossible to be wholly sure, but that seems to be the point in much of Sami’s work. His compositions favour ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations.

Another painting – The Hunter’s Return 2025 – is inspired by the landscapes of Pieter Bruegel and Paolo Uccello, and features a sodden landscape and falling trees against a luminous, but hazy, orange backdrop. Bright-green laser beams stretch across the canvas. All the things tangibly missing from a painting, such as sounds, smells, textures, are somehow evoked in Sami’s work – a haunting impression of modern warfare. Nearby is one of his most forthright statements, Reborn 2023, in which a figure is depicted wearing a military uniform adorned with gold medals. His face is partly obscured by black paint, replaced by a moth. This work speaks, perhaps, to the threat of authoritarianism and censorship.

In another work, Hiroshima Mon Amour 2024, Sami constructs a watery scene, with what looks like clothes floating below the surface. This work references the 1959 film of the same name set in Hiroshima, Japan, 14 years after the US detonated its atomic bomb. Again, Sami finds evocative ways to grapple with global tragedies. His paintings force viewers to engage critically to construct narratives that rely on subtext. It is what cannot be seen that haunts these paintings, so that they stay with you long after you leave the room.

Nnena Kalu was born in Glasgow in 1966 to Nigerian parents. She has been a resident artist at ActionSpace’s studio at Studio Voltaire in London since 1999. Kalu, who is autistic, with limited verbal communication, is the first learning-disabled artist ever nominated for the Turner Prize. Artists like Kalu have historically been sidelined from the world stage of contemporary art, but here she is at the centre, with a powerful, highly individual style developed over decades.

Encountering Kalu’s work for the first time is to be bombarded with colour and energy. Her display at Cartwright Hall is a parade of her expressive winding sculptures and drawings. Suspended from the ceilings are Kalu’s cocoon-like formations. She creates them by wrapping fabric, rope, and VHS tape around a structural base, resulting in vivid knotted forms that are both unpredictable and theatrical. There is a symbiotic relationship between the sculptures and the artist’s body – a dance that allows these works to feel like living, breathing things.

Learning that Kalu makes much of her work while listening to disco, ABBA, Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson makes absolute sense. There is a physicality to her work – a bodiliness and rhythm apparent even at first glance. With all the layering of colours and textures, there is something freeing in the excess and overspill of materials, an overwhelming sense of joy. Kalu’s structures loom large at different heights in the centre of the space and are more than beautiful shapes – they are structures made with feeling and craft in mind. Kalu’s work is like a tribute to process and material, gesture and echo. The act of making the art seems to be as important as the art itself. Flexibility, improvisation and exertion are integral to the work’s concepts. Technique is the idea.

Kalu’s drawings – which line the surrounding panelled walls – are large spiralling vortexes, created with the same circular movements as the suspended sculptures. Her hypnotic spirals, drawn with coloured pencils, feel infinite. She began making these works after the COVID-19 pandemic, and it makes me wonder whether these drawings were a way for Kalu to express a sense of chaos. While bright and playful, her lines are alive with passion and perhaps pandemic-induced frustration. Her circular lines recall the never-ending cycle that was life under those strange times.

^{Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall, until 22 February 2026}

^{Kadish Morris is an editor, writer, poet and art critic for the Observer. She lives in Leeds. Sam Hutchinson is an artist and photographer based in Leeds.}

^{Supported by The John Browne Charitable Trust and The Uggla Family Foundation.}