Karimah Ashadu in Conversation with Curator Corinne Diserens

MUSCLE (2025), by artist and filmmaker Karimah Ashadu, is an up-close portrait of bodybuilders in the heart of Lagos’s slums – a work that progresses the artist’s interest in patriarchy and the socio-economic structures of West Africa. This conversation with the artist  aims to explore her unique approach to filmmaking and to engage with the themes that permeate her work – masculinity and performance, labour and autonomy, landscape and history.

Karimah Ashadu (b. London, 1985) is a British-born Nigerian artist and film director living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Ashadu’s work is concerned with labour, patriarchy, and notions of independence as they pertain to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and its diaspora. Her work has exhibited and screened at institutions internationally, including the 60th Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Silver Lion. In 2020, Ashadu established her film production company Golddust by Ashadu, which specialises in artists’ films on Black culture and African discourses.

Karimah Ashadu is Philipp Otto Runge Fellow 2026

Free entry