Turner Prize 2025: How to Heal a Ruptured World Review of Zadie Xa's work in the Turner Prize 2025 Exhibition

By Emily Steer

This year’s Turner Prize installation is visually thrilling, with all four nominated artists channelling social and political issues that rage in the wider world. Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa variously confront the intolerant rhetoric of the far right and the violence of unchecked authoritarianism, or offer alternative means of connection that expand beyond rational and ableist ideals.

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Zadie Xa transports her viewers to the depths of the sea and the outer reaches of space. Weaving together Korean mythology and supernatural motifs, she taps into a collective psyche shaped by cultural history and enduring ancestral shockwaves. Growing up in Canada with Korean heritage, Xa is inspired by both Christian iconography and traditional Korean folklore. She combines painting with performance in complex, large-scale installations, crafting elaborate costumes and channelling a love of staging and ritual that she witnessed in Catholic church services growing up, and which are also central to shamanic practices, which she sees as early forms of artistic expression.

Xa is nominated for her installation Moonlight Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything, shown at Sharjah Biennial 16 and reimagined for Cartwright Hall. Comprising painting, sound, and hanging bells, the installation dances before the eyes. The floor is coated in a reflective gold material, throwing watery shapes onto the ceiling. Paintings in which skeletons, whales, and sweeping seas swirl and distort are reflected on the floor. Xa creates a place somewhere between reality and imagination, between this world and another realm.

Unconventional and intuitive forms of communication are threaded throughout. Whale sounds playing through speakers make it seem suddenly possible to speak beyond words, conveying an anthropomorphic clarity in their expression that almost approaches language, and which heaves with emotion. It is a particularly poignant note to Xa’s presentation at a time when whale calls in the wild are rapidly declining due to habitat and food loss. Xa views folk art as a language that connects us directly to our ancestors. This creative form has, over the years, enabled permissible methods of subversion—both political and personal—using performance and humour. The ethereal, provocative space Xa creates in this installation shows how alive the world could really feel if we allowed ourselves to listen to its inherent magic.