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Karimah Ashadu, MUSCLE, 2025. © Karimah Ashadu, 2025. Courtesy the artist; Camden Art Centre, London; Fondazione In Between Art Film; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Sadie Coles HQ, London
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Tendered is the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the filmic works of Karimah Ashadu (British/Nigerian, b. 1985), winner of the Silver Lion for Promising Young Artist at the 2024 Venice Biennale. The publication, edited by Bianca Stoppani with Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, and published on the occasion of Ashadu’s first institutional exhibitions at Camden Art Centre, London, and The Renaissance Society, Chicago, is a detailed overview of her practice features newly commissioned essays, an extended conversation with the artist and a collection of synopses documenting her video installations.
The exhibition, curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi of Fondazione In Between Art Film, is the second project launched under Unison, a biennial initiative promoted by the Fondazione to commission and produce moving image-based exhibitions in partnership with international public institutions.
The monograph is a rich resource for readers who hope to gain an understanding of the breadth of Ashadu’s practice—engaging with contemporary manifestations of Nigerian history as embodied by its people and landscapes—and spans more than a decade of work (2012–25), including Ashadu’s newly commissioned film MUSCLE. It features contributions from the artist herself; Myriam Ben Salah, executive director and chief curator at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Leonardo Bigazzi, curator at Fondazione In Between Art Film; Gina Buenfeld-Murley, curator at Camden Art Centre, London; Martin Clark, director of Camden Art Centre; Dr. Clive Chijioke Nwonka, associate professor of film, culture and society at University College London; Alessandro Rabottini, artistic director of Fondazione In Between Art Film; Bettina Steinbrügge, director of Mudam Luxembourg; and Arese Uwuoruya, assistant curator at Camden Art Centre.
Below you can read an excerpt form the conversation featured in the publication.
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Karimah Ashadu, King of Boys (Abattoir of Makoko), 2015. © Karimah Ashadu, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
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Disciplines of Desire:
A Conversation with Karimah Ashadu
LEONARDO BIGAZZI
I would like to start with how Lagos – and Nigeria more broadly – often serves as a point of departure in your work. You were born in London, but grew up in Lagos until the age of ten, then moved back to the UK. You now live in Hamburg, Germany. How does this personal geography intertwine with the narratives in your work?
KARIMAH ASHADU
Those years in Nigeria were so formative. They instilled a Nigerian-ness in me, and a great sense of pride as well, which was tested when I moved back to the UK in my youth and suddenly realised that there was something ‘Other’ about me. I had to quickly learn ‘Britishness’, and relocate not only my physical being, but my thinking and my sensibility as well. Nowadays, in the UK, I don’t feel ‘Other’. But that ‘Otherness’ stayed with me. It became acutely evident again when I moved to Germany, whose cultural heritage, as I learned, has little reconciled with its colonial past.
MARTIN CLARK
How do you think that informs your practice? Are there specific works that address this?
KARIMAH
I think that my discomfort in Germany is something I probed and continue to probe, and my films are, to an extent, self-portraits. With Brown Goods (2020), I tried to understand how I could contribute to that society in any way that felt worthy, as a Black and African woman. When I met Emeka, the film’s protagonist, and saw his work in the export of second-hand electrical goods to Africa, and that he was doing it with such pride, that struck a chord in me. With every film I make, I’m trying to understand where I fit in, either in the European landscape where I live now, or in the grander scheme of things. I’m also trying to understand my relationship with Nigeria, and the broader socio-political and economic structures that shape it. I’m interested in how history unfolded to bring us here – how colonialism imposed borders, collapsed tribes into one nation and gave us a name that distanced us from our origins.
LEONARDO
I find that much of your work renegotiates the idea of distance – for example the distance between you, your protagonists and the work’s (often Western, white) audience. I’m curious to discuss how distance and the perspective you hold by being embedded in the realities you portray – such as the slums in Lagos – shape your practice and the work you create. Class difference plays a significant role in the Nigerian context, but you also bring the experience and knowledge of observing these dynamics from Europe.
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Karimah Ashadu, Power Man, 2018. © Karimah Ashadu, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London
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KARIMAH
It’s a bit complicated to answer, and I’m thinking of an answer visually. In Makoko Sawmill (2015), for instance, the mechanisms I employ make proximity tangible. In later works, the breaking of the fourth wall, where subjects confront the viewer directly, creates a dialogue around proximity. Proximity, though, is never only physical; it is also structured by class. The act of bringing these communities into view inevitably exposes the economic and social dynamics between subject, filmmaker and audience. At the same time, I’m aware of my own distance as a filmmaker. Once the film is completed, I leave, and that can mark the end of my connection with those I’ve worked with. So I recognise the complexity of these relationships. The work is at once deeply personal, yet also marked by a certain detachment.
GINA BUENFELD-MURLEY
I’ve been thinking about your early experiments with the camera, the rudimentary adaptations you made to the technology. It brought to mind Jean Rouch and his idea of direct cinema, those experiments with the technology to make it more portable, attempting to get as close as possible to the subject. This feels especially relevant in the new film MUSCLE (2025) that we commissioned for this exhibition, which has quite an extreme proximity to the body. But what you just described diverges from Rouch’s primary motivation of a kind of cinematic realism that allows the camera to be as objective as possible, without the bias of the director. You are deliberately acknowledging your authorship, the perspective you bring, and this comes through in the range of approaches to the camera frame you’ve used, from the traveling shot in Cowboy (2022) to the panning shot in Makoko Sawmill. With each of these approaches to the camera there comes a sense, for the viewer, of a relationship to the subject, and an intention toward what is revealed, whether that’s up close and intimate, or more distant, and perhaps imposing.
KARIMAH
When I made my earlier works, I had started returning to Nigeria after having been in the UK for a long time. I was trying to figure out and understand the many things that had changed. So these mechanisms were a way to put something in front of myself while trying to figure out not only where I fit into this new landscape, but also what was going on around me. Over the length of my practice, that ‘figuring out’ has been reflected in my personal life. Many things have also changed in my life, and with the person I identify as being now. So that ‘up close and personal’ that you see in MUSCLE makes a lot of sense. There’s been a long journey, quite difficult and often painful, to arrive at a sense of self. MUSCLE is entirely intimate; you’re confronted with Black skin so close-up that it looks completely abstract. You’re not quite sure at times what you’re seeing, but how close would you get to Black skin like that?
MYRIAM BEN SALAH
That abstraction you mention feels also intentionally protective. What role does opacity or misrecognition play in your work?
KARIMAH
It is a form of care. It creates space for the possibility that something doesn’t have to be fully known in order to be felt. When I crop the frame tightly or allow the image to drift out of focus, it’s not necessarily about withholding, but about protecting the subject’s right to complexity. Historically, Black and African bodies have been overexposed and exploited. So there’s something radical, and also compassionate, about allowing a subject to evoke the very mystery it holds.
CONTINUE READING
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Karimah Ashadu, Plateau, 2021–22. © Karimah Ashadu, 2021. Courtesy the artist; Fondazione In Between Art Film; Sadie Coles HQ, London
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