Camden Arts Centre welcomes the solo exhibition by artist and filmmaker Karimah Ashadu, winner of the Silver Lion for Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale 2024.
Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi of Fondazione In Between Art Film, the exhibition includes the premier of MUSCLE – a newly commissioned moving-image installation – as well as a series of new sculptures conceived especially for the show that reference objects and environments within the film.
MUSCLE (2025) is an intimate portrait of body builders in the heart of Lagos’ slums striving to attain a hyper-masculine ideal, continuing the artist’s research into issues of socio-economic independence and patriarchy within the context of West African culture and society. MUSCLE is commissioned and produced by Camden Art Centre, Fondazione In Between Art Film, and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where it will be presented in autumn 2026.
In addition, the exhibition features a selection of earlier moving image works also set in Lagos – King of Boys (2015), a window into the inner workings of the Makoko abattoir, and Cowboy (2022), a two-channel film that follows a man who has dedicated his life to the care of horses – configured within discrete environments that extend aspects of the films into the viewing space. The show takes visitors on a journey through the range of Ashadu’s practice, from the intimate to the expansive, featuring works that form a cinematic narrative of bodies and land – an undulating scenario of urban subcultures, quotidian labour, and our relationship to nature.
Ashadu’s practice looks at the contemporary manifestations of Nigerian history as they are borne by its people and landscape. Having grown up between the United Kingdom and Nigeria, the artist situates her point of view within a constant negotiation of distance, one that pertains to diasporic existences. It is through a sympathetic proximity – as opposed to a documentary approach – that Ashadu observes the struggles, and gathers the stories, of working men – from the motorcycle taxi riders in Machine Boys (2024) to the tin miners in Plateau (2022) or the palm oil farmers in Red Gold (2016). Her background in painting carries through to the visual language of her films, combining a strong sense of colour, composition and form, with the fugitive kinetics of her camera lens. This unique approach to the handling of the camera, and the framing of its gaze, defies the tendency towards spectacle in colonial ethnographic documentation. Ashadu’s nuanced and intimate portraits, whether of individuals or communities, probe multifaceted reflections onto the notions of masculinity and patriarchal systems within the cultural context of West Africa, as they are inextricably related to the conditions of economic independence and exploitation in the aftermath of British colonial rule.
We highly recommend this exhibition in Camden at the Camden Arts Centre.
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