Turner Prize 2025
Image: Nnena Kalu. Exhibition view, Turner Prize 2025, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford,
27 September 2025–22 February 2026. Photo: David Levene.
ART
Nnena Kalu
Turner Prize
Nnena Kalu has won the Turner Prize 2025, presented in a ceremony in Bradford, this year’s UK City of Culture. The 59-year-old British Nigerian becomes the first artist with a learning disability to win the prize. Nnena Kalu creates hanging sculptures from wrappings of different materials making cocoon-like shapes, as well as large-scale drawings made with vigorous, rhythmic lines. The jury commended Kalu’s bold and compelling work, praising her lively translation of expressive gesture into captivating abstract sculpture and drawing. Noting her distinct practice and finesse of scale, composition and colour, they admired the powerful presence these works have.
RIBA House of the Year 2025
Image: Caochan na Craige by Izat Arundell, Isle of Harris, Scotland, UK. Photo: Richard Gaston.
ARCHITECTURE
Caochan na Craige
RIBA House of the Year
Caochan na Craige on the Isle of Harris in Scotland has been named as the winner of RIBA's Grand Designs House of the Year for 2025. The RIBA judges noted that, "To do a project like this in such a remote location on that budget required a partnership that is really admirable. An amazing achievement against lots of odds." Couple Eilidh Izat and Jack Arundell built their home from Lewisian Gneiss rock, from the Isle of Lewis, believed to be one of the most ancient stones on the planet.
About the RIBA House of the Year
Tate Britain Commission 2026
Image: Pavilion of France, La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Zineb Sedira, Les rêves n’ont pas de titre / Dreams have no titles. Photo: Thierry Bal.
ART
Zineb Sedira
Tate Britain Commission
Zineb Sedira (b.1963, France) will be the next artist to undertake the Tate Britain Commission. Unveiled for the first time on 13 May 2026, Sedira’s major new work will be the latest response to the unique context of the neo-classical Duveen Galleries at the heart of Tate Britain. Sedira's work draws on personal encounters within the Algerian diaspora of Africa. Taking inspiration from family archives and the history of cinema, she bridges the political and the poetic, thoughtfully exploring themes of memory, migration and trauma. Her installations invite audiences to consider the emotional and geographical dimensions of displacement, while critically examining dominant historical narratives.
About the Tate Britain Commission
Prix André et Paul Arfvidson
Académie des beaux-arts
Image: Mouzaïa by Canal Architecture, Paris 19e, France, 2015-2021. Photo: Pierre L’Excellent.
ARCHITECTURE
Mouzaïa
Prix André et Paul Arfvidson - Académie des beaux-arts
Mouzaïa by Canal Architecture is the inaugural winner of the Prix André et Paul Arfvidson - Académie des beaux-arts. Each year, the prize will recognize a ‘creative intervention’ carried out in France on a 20th-century heritage site or building, with the aim of promoting contemporary creation for contemporary architectural heritage. Completed between 2015 and 2021, the Mouzaïa project involves the renovation of a building complex located on Rue de Mouzaïa (Paris 19e). The project is part of a major initiative to renovate Brutalist architecture. Far from taking a rigid or nostalgic approach, the project demonstrates that it is possible to reinvest in this concrete heritage, transforming it to meet today's social, environmental, and urban challenges.
About the Prix André et Paul Arfvidson - Académie des beaux-arts
Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo 2025-2026
Image: Céleste Richard-Zimmermann, Martyre décorum (detail), 2021. Polystyrene bas-relief, work supported by the Région des Pays de la Loire. Photo: Gregory Valton.
ART
Céleste Richard-Zimmermann
Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo
Céleste Richard-Zimmermann is the winner of the Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo 2025-2026. The artist will benefit from a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in October 2026, curated by Horya Makhlouf. Céleste Richard-Zimmermann lives and works in Nantes. She combines sculpture, installation, and painting to create worlds where the grotesque and the poetic meet. Inspired by curent events, popular myths, and animality, she stages a theater of hybrid beings – dogs, rats, marginal figures – who question power relations and mechanisms of domination. Her work explores the boundaries between humanity and animality, between violence and tenderness, revealing the fragile beauty of contemporary chaos.
About the Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo
ARTnews Awards 2025
Image: Installation view, Claudia Alarcón & Silät, James Cohan, 52 Walker Street, New York, NY, April 11–May 10, 2025.
ART
Claudia Alarcón & Silät
Emerging Artist of the Year
ARTnews announced the winners of the second ARTnews Awards, an editorial project honoring excellence in art achievements at US arts institutions. Claudia Alarcón & Silät won Emerging Artist of the Year for “Claudia Alarcón & Silät” at James Cohan, New York. For over a decade, Claudia Alarcón has been immortalizing aspects of Wichí lore in the form of weavings, many of them produced collaboratively with an all-women group of weavers called Silät that was formed by curator Andrei Fernández. Working in Argentina’s Salta province, these women have used traditional Wichí techniques to give physical form to narratives that are normally transmitted orally.
Image: Installation view, Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me, MCA Chicago, Feb 1–Oct 19, 2025. Photo: Bob. (Robert Chase Heishman).
ART
Wafaa Bilal
Established Artist of the Year
Wafaa Bilal won Established Artist of the Year for “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. For nearly two decades, Wafaa Bilal has put his body on the line for his art-making. “Indulge Me” at the MCA Chicago, the first major survey for the Iraqi American artist, showcased how his work highlights the tension – implicit at times, explicit at others – between what is perceived to be a conflict zone and what is perceived to be its inverse, a ‘comfort zone.’
Image: Installation view of Ceremonies Out the the Air: Ralph Lemon, on view at MoMA PS1 from November 14, 2024 through March 24, 2025. Photo: Steven Paneccasio.
ART
Ralph Lemon
Lifetime Achievement
Ralph Lemon won Lifetime Achievement for “Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon” at MoMA PS1, New York. Never content to work in just one medium, Ralph Lemon spent the past three decades creating works that blur the divisions between dance, drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, and writing. He started out as a dancer and choreographer, operating the Ralph Lemon Dance Company for a decade before disbanding it in 1995 to focus on other artistic endeavors. Lemon sees his practice as being one of generative collaboration in which anything and everything can be a form of art-making.
AIA Gold Medal 2026
Image: Shigeru Ban, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France, 2010. Photo: Didier Boy de la Tour.
ARCHITECTURE
Shigeru Ban
AIA Gold Medal
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced that architect Shigeru Ban is the recipient of the 2026 AIA Gold Medal. The Japanese architect's work was highlighted for its inventive use of renewable materials such as paper and timber, his innovation in timber architecture, his commitment to social service through design, and his 30 years as an educator at universities including Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia.
2026 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize
Image: Installation view, NXTHVN Cohort 06, The Things Left Unsaid, James Cohan, New York, May 6 - June 21, 2025. Photo: Phoebe d'Heurle.
ART
Napoles Marty
Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize
Cuban-born, Connecticut-based artist Napoles Marty has been awarded the 2026 Frieze Los Angeles Impact Prize. He will receive an endowment and a solo presentation at Frieze Los Angeles 2026. The prize, now in its fifth year, provides support and recognition to an early-career artist and is given in partnership with a non-profit organisation, in this instance the Connecticut-based arts incubator NXTHVN. Napoles Marty works primarily in large-scale sculpture, painting and drawing. He carves his figures from wood and chars their surfaces with fire, a physical, ritualistic process that breathes life and energy into the sculptures, transforming destruction into renewal. His work navigates the boundary between reality and imagination, balancing classical and modernist aesthetics while channelling deeply personal and collective narratives.
