Over the past 15 years, British-Nigerian artist Karimah Ashadu—recipient of the Venice Biennale’s 2024 Silver Lion—has forged a bold, formally inventive cinema that plunges viewers into the tactile realities of labor. Shooting on location in Lagos, Hamburg, and Nigeria’s Jos Plateau, Ashadu maps informal economies shaped by migration, global commerce, and colonial extraction, deliberately revealing her camera’s presence to unsettle the distance between viewer and subject. Her 2015 film King of Boys (Abattoir of Makoko) observes the raw operations of an open-air butcher shop through the crimson filter of a plastic beer keg, Brown Goods (2020) follows a Nigerian migrant navigating Hamburg’s secondhand export trade, and Plateau (2021–22) moves among undocumented tin miners carving out a living from a landscape scarred by colonial industry. Sensorially charged and keenly observed, these cinematic encounters underscore the uneasy friction between self-determination and systemic exploitation.
Presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, in conjunction with Karimah Ashadu: Tendered (September 12–November 1, 2026) and the Art Institute of Chicago’s presentation of Karimah Ashadu: Machine Boys (opening September 11, 2026).