Zadie Xa: Turner Prize 2025 Exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery
Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture unveils an exhibition of works by the four artists who have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery in Bradford: Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa.
The world’s leading prize for the visual arts, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary art. The winner will be announced on 9 December 2025 at an award ceremony at Bradford Grammar School. The exhibition at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery is free to visit and is open from 27 September 2025 – 22 February 2026.
Zadie Xa creates installations that imagine alternative worlds. These immersive environments are conjured from a wide range of sources and research interests, including spirituality, ancestry, and cultural traditions, particularly from her own Korean and Canadian background.
Xa was nominated for her solo presentation Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything in Sharjah Biennial 16, United Arab Emirates. Her presentation at Carwright Hall Art Gallery uses painting, sound, textiles and sculpture to consider links between ocean life, generational grief, Korean shamanism and ghostly spirits. In the centre of the gallery hundreds of shamanic bells hang forming the outline of a shell. Around the edges of the room four more seashells project a soundscape inspired by nature, confessions and the music of Salpuri, a traditional Korean exorcism dance. The exhibition also includes painted walls depicting a sun and moon in perpetual rise and fall, alongside paintings which echo the Korean practice of bojagi, where scraps of cloth are stitched together to make textiles for wrapping objects, or used in domestic rituals. Scenes of marine life and folk practices appear within these colourful patchworks. Xa’s practice often involves collaboration and she worked closely with artist and longtime collaborator Benito Mayor Vallejo to develop the exhibition design, as well as the mural and sculptural elements of this display.
