Rene Matić, AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, Installation view, CCA Berlin, 2024. Photos: Diana Pfammatter/CCA Berlin.
Set up in 1984, the Turner Prize has been awarded to a photographer only once – but Rene Matić has won a nomination aged just 27, for a solo show featuring stacked images, installations, and sound art
Rene Matić has been nominated for the Turner Prize, alongside artists Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, and Zadie Xa. An artist working predominantly with photography, Matić was nominated for the solo exhibition AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH, which was on show at CCA Berlin from 08 November 2024 to 15 February 2025 and included personal shots of family and friends, stacked up against the walls. The exhibition also included sound and installations, such as a display of Black dolls, and a banner reading NO PLACE, referencing both President Biden’s comments after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and the contradictions of political rhetoric and action.
“The exhibition occupied a series of disused wood-panelled offices within the postwar building that houses the Center for Contemporary Art. Matić’s work explores the dynamics of race, gender, class and nationhood through the lens of personal relationships and their lived experience,” said Sam Lackey, director of the Liverpool Biennial and one of the judges of this year’s Turner Prize, as the shortlist was announced. “The exhibition, which comprised a sequence of installations of found objects, photography, sculpture and sound, conveyed a strong sense of private intimacy with a political resonance of occupation emphasised by that location.”
Lackey added that various elements in the show “created the development of the practice into a densely layered and highly effective installation that consistently and generously allowed connection between image, object and personal experience. In capturing and sharing personal [experiences] they present an enactment of vulnerability and resistance, of resilience and existence that crucially engages with the complexities of existing in this world and at this moment.”
“Photography and imaging is a weapon – I use it to contradict and undermine”
– Rene Matić
Matić’s work will go on show at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery from 27 September to 22 February 2026 as part of the Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture programme, alongside work by the three other nominated artists. Kalu was nominated for her graphic, drawing and sculptural work, as presented as part of Conversations at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, and Hanging Sculpture 1 to 10 at Manifesta 15, Barcelona; Sami was nominated for his solo exhibition After the Storm at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, a series of large-scale paintings drawing on his life in Baghdad during the Iraq War and as a refugee in Sweden. Xa was nominated for her presentation Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything with Benito Mayor Vallejo at Sharjah Biennial 16, which interweaves painting, mural, textile and sound.
The winner will be announced in Bradford on 09 December, and will receive £25,000, while the three other shortlisted artists will each receive £10,000. Along with Sam Lackey, the 2025 Turner Prize jury this year included Andrew Bonacina, independent curator; Priyesh Mistry, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects, The National Gallery; and Habda Rashid, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Fitzwilliam Museum. The jury was chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director, Tate Britain.
Established in 1984, the Turner Prize has only been awarded to a photographer once – Wolfgang Tillmans in 2000. However other previous winners work with photography and found images alongside other media, such as Jasleen Kaur (2024) and Charlotte Prodger (2018). In 2019 Tai Shani, who works with photography, film, installation and performance, shared the prize with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, and Oscar Murillo, after all four nominees requested the jury not select a winner. In 2020 the Turner Prize was cancelled owing to the Covid pandemic, and 10 artists, including photographer Liz Johnson Artur, were instead each awarded a £10,000 grant.
Born in Peterborough in 1997, Rene Matić graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Central St Martins in 2017, and lives and works in London. An artist and writer, their work engages with themes of post-Blackness, feminism and class, and – inspired by ska and 2-Tone music and dance – aims for a ‘rudeness’ that celebrates interruption and in-betweeness. Their debut show at Vitrine Gallery in 2020 was titled Born British, Die British, and was a ‘love letter’ to their father, as well as an investigation of ‘Britishness’. In 2022 Matić had an exhibition at South London Gallery titled Upon This Rock, which explored what it means to be British, and included a film of their father; in 2023 they showed A Girl for the Living Room at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol.
In 2021 they published a photobook titled Flags for Countries That Don’t Exist but Bodies That Do. “My dad doesn’t have any pictures of himself when he was younger, and the Black side of my family has no pictures because they moved around so much in England, when they couldn’t get a permanent place to stay,” Matić told BJP at that time. “So my granddad was constantly packing up, and things got left behind. As someone who’s always looking for where I’ve come from, it was like, OK, so that’s not possible… [This book] is where I’ve come from. And when we’re older, we’ll look back and be like, ‘That’s where we came from’.”
BJP’s Dalia Al-Dujaili interviewed Matić earlier this year, and found the artist working on a solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, Idols Lovers Mothers Friends, a meditation on love on show from 25 April to 03 June 2025, featuring prints Matić made herself in the darkroom. “Photography and imaging is a weapon – I use it to contradict and undermine,” Matić told Al-Dujaili. “I am taking [the] next year as an opportunity to refine my image-making practice.”
Turner Prize 2025 is on show at Cartwright Hall, Bradford from 27 September to 22 February 2026. Idols Lovers Mothers Friends is on show at Arcadia Missa from 25 April to 03 June 2025