The theme of memory in art is explored by a panel of artists, curators and academics, with reference to the Turner Prize 2025 and artists connected to West Yorkshire.
Curated by Yorkshire Contemporary in partnership with the University of Leeds.
We invite our panellists to consider the works of the Turner Prize 2025 nominees as objects of memory that ‘reveal’ themselves through a range of complex, often unstable, societal and institutional structures. We ask, can the Turner Prize 2025 artists be seen and understood, via their work, as sharing and revealing memories, whether individual or collective?
During the event we will discuss how diasporic memories – personal, generational or inherited – are represented through art. We will explore the idea that ‘remembering’ can be seen as a creative process of reimagining memories for a new future, alongside conserving the past and reclaiming lost cultural traditions. Also to be considered is how art and memory can help shape and challenge who we are, as well as our perceived place in the world around us.
Professor Joanne Crawford, Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, chairs a panel comprising of artist Phoebe Boswell; Creative Director at Bradford 2025, UK City of Culture Shanaz Gulzar; Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine, London Tamsin Hong; and artist and filmmaker Karanjit Panesar.
Panelists Biographies
Phoebe Boswell (b. Nairobi, Kenya, lives/works London) is a British/Kenyan interdisciplinary artist moving between drawing, painting, film, installation, sound, and writing, with a commitment to the drawn body, the decolonial body, the intimate and the collective body, and how it is seen, felt, loved, and cared for. Her work is held and exhibited in public institutions globally, she received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists and was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, and was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer-in-residence.
Professor Joanne Crawford is Head of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies and Professor in History and Theory of Art at the University of Leeds.
Shanaz Gulzar MBE, Creative Director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, is an acclaimed artist, producer and presenter whose career spans film, visual arts, theatre, public art and media. She led on the creation of the Bradford 2025 cultural programme; working with local, national and international partners to deliver an ambitious programme of work rooted in the unique heritage and character of Bradford district, ensuring local people were at the heart of the programme. Shanaz has previously worked as a producer at Manchester International Festival (MIF) and has presented a number of BBC television programmes including Yorkshire Walks and the documentary film Hidden Histories: The Lost Portraits of Bradford.
Tamsin Hong is a contemporary international art curator. Her intersectional research interests draw from her upbringing on unceded Ngunnawal Country on the land now known as Australia and include feminism, women’s knowledge systems, embodied practices, re-indigenising approaches and decoloniality. Hong is Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine, London where her projects include the 2026 Pavilion, Arpita Singh: Remembering (2025), Yinka Shonibare CBE: Suspended States (2024) and Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015 (2023). She was formerly Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, specialising in performance, worked on African and Australian acquisitions, and co-curated the land rights exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992.
Karanjit Panesar is an artist and filmmaker interested in how identity is formulated within political, economic and social structures.
The Turner Prize is one of the world’s best-known prizes for the visual arts. It aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art and tickets are free.
The prize is awarded each year to a British artist, and is named in honour of the radical painter JMW Turner. In the year that the UK celebrates the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth, the Turner Prize is heading to Bradford.
The shortlisted artists – Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa – were announced on 23 April 2025, 250 years to the day since the birth of Turner. Their work features in the current Turner Prize exhibition, which takes place at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery. Nnena Kalu was announced as the winner in Bradford in December 2025.