2025 Prize Winner

The 2025 Prize winner was Laisul Hoque, receiving a £15,000 cash prize and the opportunity to present a solo exhibition at Bow Arts’ Nunnery Gallery. Drawing from his memories and lived experiences, Laisul Hoque creates image-based works and installations that explore and decode microhistories and their global impacts. His practice investigates communication and miscommunication and adopts a reparative reading of the past.

Hoque’s winning work, An Ode to All the Flavours (2024), is an interactive sculpture resembling an antique sodium-lit ‘Bangladeshi sweet shop’ display counter. Inspired by the artist’s earliest memory of his father sharing his favourite childhood snack, the sculpture holds spice-seasoned fried gram flour flakes and fried chickpea flour balls soaked in sugar syrup.

During the installation, the snacks are replenished daily by Oitij-jo, a charity that celebrates the cultural heritage and diversity of the Bengali diaspora.

2025 Prize Runner-up

The 2025 Prize runner-up is Lydia Newman, who will receive a year-long studio residency with Bow Arts. Newman is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, live performance and creative workshop facilitation.

Newman’s shortlisted work is the first in her four-part series In the Wake of Ruin. Weaving elements from across her practice, the work examines inherited ideas about race, globalisation, class and gender, rooted in the foundations of colonialism as experienced by a descendent of the Black Diaspora.

Lydia’s painting was very moving to me, I can feel an urgency rushing through the canvas and a connection to her wider practice which includes performance and sculpture. I look forward to seeing her work develop with the studio space and the support of Bow Arts. 

Phoebe Collings-James