Celebrating the work of Zadie Xa
Following her nomination for the Turner Prize 2025, revisit Xa’s Somerset House Studios commission.
Zadie Xa – a Korean-Canadian visual artist whose cross-disciplinary practice combines sculpture, painting, light, sound, video and performance to create immersive and experiential works – has been nominated for the 2025 edition of the Turner Prize with the work Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything, alongside artists Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić and Mohammed Sami.
Inspired by Salpuri, a Korean exorcism dance, Zadie Xa’s ‘Moonlit Confessions’ is a multisensory installation – created with Spanish artist Benito Mayor Vallejo – that incorporates painting, mural, textile and sound. ‘Composed of over 1000 chained brass bells, each strategically positioned to collectively form a large conch shell, this sculpture floats silently until activated by touch to produce sound’ (Sahar Khraibani, Sharjah Art Foundation), Xa’s ‘Moonlit Confessions’ has been described by this year’s Turner jury as a ‘vibrant’ and ‘cohesive work’ that realises ‘a sophisticated development of Xa’s reflective and enchanting practice.’
“I wanted to think about ways in which we might communicate with people—and when I say people I don’t only mean humans—that have passed on, and what kind of things they would like to impart to us…”
Zadie Xa, ‘Highlights from Sharjah Biennial 16,’ BerlinArtLink
In 2020, Xa developed and presented a six-part, cross-disciplinary composition for Assembly – Somerset House Studios’ experimental sound, music, and performance series. The narrative sound piece, titled Moon Poetics 4 Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers, was originally presented within a specially designed online platform for spatial listening, as part of a series of spatial sound commissions which included works by Ben Vince, Loraine James, Lafwandah and Kelman Duran. Xa’s work would later be presented as part of their solo show at Leeds Art Gallery.
Featuring excerpts from Adrienne Marie Brown's ‘Emergent Strategy,’ Hwang Sok-Yong’s ‘Princess Bari’ and a 1971 interview between Bruce Lee’s and Pierre Berton, Moon Poetics tells the story of animal kinship as a survival strategy with which to save an ailing planet. In a work loosely based on the Korean shamanic story of Princess Bari, the audience is taken on a guided journey through parallel dimensions, led by a host of creatures voiced by actor Samantha Lawson.
“Stories carry a lot of power. In many Indigenous cultures around the globe, appointed community members are holders of sacred stories, and only they are permitted to share them. The colonial and patriarchal Western education or academic system hasn’t always recognized this transmission of knowledge or record keeping as the “correct” way to catalogue information. And perhaps this is why shamanistic stories and traditional knowledge were considered to be of low value in Korea, within the context of dominant Confucian rule and ideology. Moon Poetics is placed within an oral tradition for this reason: I respect and value this type of knowledge transmission.”
‘Art is a Shapeshifter: Sarah Shin & Zadie Xa in Conversation,’ Remai Modern
Furthering Xa’s ongoing engagement with the powerful complexities of interspecies communication, matriarchal social structures and ancestral homelands, Moon Poetics was featured in Xa’s solo exhibitions at Remai Modern, Saskatoon Canada 2020 and Leeds Art Gallery 2021 following its initial presentation at Somerset House, and see below for a conversation between Xa and Tamar Clarke-Brown for the online Assembly 2020 programme.
One of the world’s best-known prizes for the visual arts, the Turner Prize aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. Established in 1984, the prize is named for the radical painter JMW Turner (1775-1851) and is awarded each year to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work. The Turner Prize winner will be awarded £25,000 with £10,000 awarded to the other shortlisted artists. The 2025 edition of the prize coincides with the 250th anniversary of JMW Turner’s birth, and Xa’s work will be exhibited alongside Kalu, Matić and Sami at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall, 27 September 2025 to 22 February 2026.
Take a look at the current resident artists based at Somerset House here, and revisit the 2024 Assembly programme featuring contributions, collaborations and performances from Bríghde Chaimbeul, Maëva Berthelot, Temitope Ajose, Nkisi, Joshua Woolford, Chuquimamani-Condori, Prem Sahib, Dis Fig, Lord Tusk, Zein Majali, exlRuth, Vivienne Griffin with Úna Monaghan, Shamica Ruddock, Félicia Atkinson, Mark Leckey, Elaine Mitchener, Shenece Oretha and more. Many of Assembly 2024’s original commissions went on to tour throughout 2024, including to Rewire in the Hague, CTM in Berlin, Brighton Festival and Edinburgh Art Festival.