An Art Critic's Review

 Nnena Kalu has won the 2025 Turner prize for her colourful drawings and sculptures made from fabric and VHS tape. Here's an art critic describing her work.

Nnena Kalu's forms come at you with their almost alien presence. What? They bulge and bifurcate and multiply. Really? The viewer gets caught up in all the roaring, spilling, snagging details, and you begin to wonder about your own boundaries, the body's beginnings and its endings. I am beginning to wonder but not about boundaries, beginnings and endings, yet.

The closer you get to Kalu's endless sinewy trails of old VHS tape, their spews of filigree plastic webbing, their bound-up, sometimes cable-tied suturings, the harder it is to know where their forms stop and the space around them begins. Am I on an operating table? Their containment is precarious. I think I must be and  things don't look too good. So full of life and energy, you think they might burst. Sweet Lord, I haven't made a will.

An Operation for Stone in the Head
Jan van Hemessen (c. 1500 -c.. 1575)
Photo Credit: Wellcome Collection [Public Domain]

Kalu's art is so embodied, so much a trace of her constant physical engagement, so much a negotiation between the body that made it and the bodies she creates, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the activity of making and the thing itself. This anesthetic must be very strong. This was true, too, in the figures Giacometti made in his room filled with plaster dust. Hallucinating now. But Kalu's art is not reducible to anything we might call a technique, and comparisons to other artists aren't much help. Isn't Doctor Kalu a proper surgeon?...

Kalu's work has to speak for itself... All art is about overcoming difficulty in one way or another, in order to find a voice. Hers is a constant flux between objects and space, herself and others, and the boundaries that contain us. Her work is the product of drive and urgency and intent. With their spiralling, repetitive marks, their accretion of overdrawn layers, their adjustments and variety of touches, her drawings are all about the cumulative. You can wake up now, it's all over.

(Adrian Searle, The Guardian, 2025)