Nina Kahlo becomes the first artist with learning disabilities to win the Turner Prize Turner Prize

Nnena Kalu has won the 2025 Turner Prize for her colorful drawings and sculptures made from found canvas and VHS tape, becoming the first artist with a learning disability to receive the £25,000 prize.

Alex Farquharson, Chairman of the Jury and Director of Tate Britain, said that the victory of the British-Nigerian artist represents a watershed moment in the world of international art.

“Nina’s work was chosen largely because of its quality, but because she is a neurodiverse artist, because her verbal communication is limited, she is someone who would have previously been on the outside,” he said.

“[Her win] It begins to erase those boundaries between the neurodivergent and the neurodiverse artist. Suddenly you realize that this was a boundary around our history, around contemporary art. But these boundaries are dissolving.”

Charlotte Holinshed, Callow Studio Director and artistic facilitator, gave the winner’s speech on her behalf. “Nina has faced an incredible amount of discrimination, which continues to this day, so we hope this award will help break down that prejudice,” she said.

Kalo wore a rose that read, “Idol, legend, winner, whatever,” which is what one workshop participant said about the artist.

Kahlo’s drawings and sculptures, which Guardian art critic Eddy Frankel described as “huge cocoons wrapped in huge, tight, twisty, hyper-colourful knots,” impressed the judges, who were torn in a year in which almost all the artists were nominated as potential winners.

The Turner Prize, considered one of the most prestigious awards in the art world, is given to an artist born or working in Britain for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work during the previous year.

The 2025 nominees were widely seen as artists who all seemed to speak to the contemporary era in Britain, where identity and the concept of belonging are constantly changing. Critical response to the work was usually emotional and divided.

Adrian Searle of The Guardian praised the show, but singled out Callow as the standout artist. Her work consists of masking tape, cling film, reused plastics, fabrics, cable ties, and VHS tape bound into various shapes.

Searle said Callow, an autistic artist with learning difficulties and limited verbal communication, created work that was “irreducible” and reminiscent of American artist Judith Scott and German artist Hanne Darboven.

“There is no candy,” he wrote. “Callow deserves to win this year’s Turner Prize.” His comments proved prophetic but other critics felt similarly passionately about other artists.

The Telegraph’s Alistair Sook noted the “violent” work of Mohammed Sami, an artist who began his career painting official portraits of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. He chose his painting, “The Return of the Hunter,” and wrote that “the enormous 19-foot-wide vision of combat troops, in which green lasers cut through a dense orange dust storm,” was so unsettling that “certainly, the award should go to him.”

Nancy Durant of The Times also named Sammy the best work of 2025. “Evocative, allusive, and exquisitely executed, they are stunning works that reward long contemplation,” she wrote.

Peterborough’s Rene Matich was the second-youngest nominee ever, and their work included an installation where Nina Simone’s vocals and bell hooks drifted over the room.

Matic, the only photographer on the shortlist, posted images from their private lives, including his collection of black dolls and snapshots of nights out, which represent “contested ideas about nation and belonging” or, as they put it, “an obsession with understanding British identity, or not”.

Vancouver-born Korean artist Zadie Xa creates paintings depicting Korean folkloric figures, skeletal musicians, swimming dolphins, passing squid, and sea turtles. Searle was not impressed by the work, writing that “this muddled, overwrought, over-thought exercise in luxury brand shamanism is as excessive as it is unnecessary.”

The award was presented at a ceremony at Bradford Grammar School, a short distance from Cartwright Hall where this year’s competition is being held as part of Bradford City of Culture. The award is back on the road after last year’s ceremony at Tate Britain, its spiritual home.

In Cartwright Hall, each of the candidates was given a separate room, with the work displayed on two floors of the building. The award was presented by Stephen Frayne also known as Dynamo.

Kalu was born in Glasgow in 1966 to Nigerian parents, but moved at an early age to Wandsworth in London. She first began practicing at Hill House Day Center in Tooting, South London in the late 1980s. She now has her own studio at ActionSpace in Clapham, a charity that provides space and aids learning for disabled artists.

Its path was meteoric. In 2016, she exhibited alongside contemporary artists including Laure Provost in Belgium; He then participated in the Glasgow International two years later. Its first trade show was last year, and in 2025 its first major institutional exhibition opens at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway.

Callow made history by winning the award, with disability charity Sense describing her nomination as “much deserved and long overdue”.

Farquharson added: “The drawings have this beautiful visual, subtle formal quality, while the sculptures look like swirls or vortexes and draw you in. They’re these amazingly attractive things, which draw you in and give you joy and keep you coming back.”