Silver Lion Winner Karimah Ashadu On Art, Resilience and Making Her U.S. Debut
In 2024, Machine Boys, a film that explores performative masculinity, premiered at the Venice Biennale, and its director, Karimah Ashadu, won the prestigious Silver Lion for a Young Participant. Set in Lagos, Nigeria, the film follows the lives of the men who ride banned motorcycle taxis, known locally as okada, for a living. “Her feminist camera lens is extraordinarily sensitive and intimate, capturing the bikers’ subcultural experience as well as their economic precarity,” the jury said about the British Nigerian artist’s work.
Machine Boys is now on view at Canal Projects in “Karimah Ashadu: Machine Boys,” the artist’s institutional debut in the United States, through July 26. Concurrently, her work Brown Goods (2020), featuring a Nigerian immigrant in Hamburg, Germany, telling his story about his journey to Europe and exporting secondhand goods to African countries including Nigeria, is featured in “The Gatherers,” a group show about global waste and excess at MoMA PS1 through October 6. Observer recently caught up with Ashadu to learn more about Machine Boys and her practice, and the conversation has been edited for length and flow.
What surprised you about the reaction to Machine Boys and winning a Silver Lion during its premiere at the Venice Biennale last year?
That’s a good question. Whenever I make new work, I always make it for myself first because my practice involves many questions about the themes I’m interested in. Machine Boys is very much in that thread. I wanted to make something that delved into notions of post-colonialism, industry and the lack thereof in Nigeria.
I also wanted to look at the zeitgeist in Lagos and touch on what it meant to embrace masculinity in this very performed way. Then, I wanted to present it to the public in a very engaging way, where the installation was performed as an extension of the work or as a container for the work. And the reaction has been mind-blowing and beyond my expectations. At the same time, it’s just been such an incredible response and like a snowball effect, and I think it’s everything an artist would dream of.
How do your experiences being raised in Nigeria show up in your work, even if a production isn’t necessarily about the country?
My work is always about Nigeria, even if I make a film about the diaspora, which I’ve done before with Brown Goods. I was born in London and grew up in Nigeria, but I think those formative years in Nigeria really shaped me.
It’s something that no matter where I have been, I have not been able to shake off, nor would I want to. It’s something that’s very much in me. There was an incident where a few years ago, the national anthem was playing, and I still knew the words from when I was a kid—my sister was just looking at me like, what? (laughs) I have such a deep love and reverence for my country and everything that comes with it, with all its histories. In the stories that I’m telling, I’m always seeking to—I wouldn’t say elevate—to present this deep pride that Nigerians have. No matter the conditions of the country, we are always seeking a way forward, no matter what. We’ll make things happen. That is an incredible thing that Nigerians have; we’re so hardy. Put us anywhere, and we will survive. I think that is incredible as a people, and that’s something I’m just fascinated by. And if my work embodies a semblance of that, then I have done something worth doing.
I think rooted in my work is this historical understanding of the country, colonialism’s role and how we were pre-colonization and then post-colonization. People fail to understand the deep wounds that colonization has caused, and why things are the way they are today. But I don’t want to be the person who lectures people—that’s not my intention. I want to do much more than that. I want to draw people in with beauty and interest, and then before you realize what you’re engaging with, it’s too late. You’re already like, ‘Machine Boys is this cool, really amazing work that’s wow.’ Then you look beyond the surface and see it’s talking about some very deep issues. And I really like that playfulness that my work has—to be able to kind of offer really in-depth themes and issues in a very playful or interesting way. I think it’s a skill that I’m mastering more and more.
What can you share about Brown Goods and its inclusion in the group show at MoMA PS1?
As an artist, as a Nigerian, as a woman, a Black woman, navigating what it is to thrive in the diaspora and to live in a place that is conditioned with such prejudice, like Germany. To understand your essence and your worth, to hold your own somewhere like this is not an easy thing to do. When I was thinking of doing my first work in Germany, in Hamburg, I wanted to do something that really related to my experiences and the themes of my practice. But that also kind of shone a light on things that were happening in Hamburg, in Germany, that people just didn’t even realize.
I met this guy, Emeka. I was traveling to Hamburg on a train, and I was coming back from somewhere and found this location. I was like, ‘What’s that?’ and looked at a map, went there, started talking to people and met loads of people. Then I met Emeka, and we just kind of jelled. And once I understood what was going on, this very incredible secondhand trading, I was like, “I’ve got to make a film on this. How do I go about this?” And then I went beyond making a film. I also made a series of sculptures made from found objects because I also wanted to kind of comment in a very tangible way on the notion of value in terms of commodity and goods by showing these secondhand automobile parts, whether it’s a Porsche windscreen or a Mercedes car’s windows. And the artwork expanded on the moving image. So, I made this film, and the reaction to the film was incredible. It was shown just before the COVID lockdown at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. And people were like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t even realize this existed in Hamburg. I didn’t even realize this was going on.’
I think that’s my job as an artist—to shine a light on and unearth things that are going on so that people can learn something about their city or their country. Brown Goods is having a bit of a moment. It’s showing more and more and more, and I’m really grateful for that because it’s an important work for me. I hope to be able to make more work in this thread.
The ending was pretty abrupt. I may be wrong.
It is abrupt. I like my films to operate where you can drop in at any time, so it doesn’t really feel like a beginning, middle or end. It’s just something that’s constantly sort of playing in this very layered way. The ending is how it is because it leaves you wanting to understand more about the story, Emeka and the situation. Hopefully, your imagination is ticking, and you are trying to extend that story in your head, and it stays with you. That was my intention.
You were quoted in an Art in America feature as saying your work elevates the everyday. Can you expand on that mindset?
People always ask me, ‘Which artists inspire you?’ And I hate naming names. Of course, I’m aware of the art that’s out there contextually before me and my peers now, but I’m most inspired by people. I’m always people-watching. Nigeria remains a great source of inspiration for me, and not just Nigeria, but the West African region. When I go to places like Dakar, I just watch people. I see how daily life is carried out with elegance, grace and tenacity. No matter the condition, you’re not wallowing. You’re like, ‘OK, how do I make things happen? … How do I push beyond this? … How can I survive? … How can I thrive?’ That resilience is something that continues to amaze me.
That’s what I’m really inspired by. It’s about having a little window into someone’s life—a small piece of what makes up the biggest story. When someone opens that window into their lives and I can make a film about it, it’s incredible. It is a great honor that people trust me with their stories and let me weave in my ideas about the themes of my work.
What did you learn being a painter that you apply in your film work?
I stopped painting about 20 years ago, shortly after leaving art school. I know it’s difficult to imagine I’m 40 (laughs). I stopped for a couple of reasons, including being very interested in performance and the physical aspect of the body at the time.
I started by attaching cameras to myself and imagining the camera as an entity with its own ideas and character. And that’s where my filmmaking came from. Looking at Plateau (2021-2022), the camera moves almost like a paintbrush and color plays an important role. Or you look at Makoko Sawmill (2015), with the blue sticks moving idiosyncratically. Or you look at a work like King of Boys (2015), which is washed in red. You can see how these painterly qualities are coming through.
But what’s really funny is that I’ve returned to painting. I had this… almost an itch. I think I was just curious as to what was trying to come through. So I picked up a paintbrush. And it was funny because the works are inspired by a film I am researching. I’m not painting on canvas; I’m painting on found material. I just had sessions in my studio, and once I was done, I was like, ‘Where did that come from?’ I can still paint and better than I ever could.
That pause has been very, very instrumental for me as a painter. It’s really funny to see how the paintings are now inspired by the filmic medium. It’s coming full circle and also showing me how expansive film is. Whether I’m thinking of translating sculpture in film or about film as embodying sculptural or painterly qualities, they’re all in dialogue with each other. What’s very interesting for me is trying to unearth all of those in a way that still puts film at the center of my practice.
What difference does having your own production company make when it comes to the stories you tell and how those stories are told?
It makes all the difference that my films are always produced or co-produced by my production company. It speaks of authorship and ownership, and also as a container, as an archive, that holds my work.
I’m also thinking of what I’m leaving behind. I’m thinking of a legacy. I grew up in an art school, looking at art books and being inspired by the artists I saw there. And I would love for my work to live on in that way. Beyond that, I want to be able to help or contribute to young filmmakers in a way that perhaps I didn’t have when I first started out. It was incredibly difficult for me to find the funding to make work. I had to be incredibly resourceful.
I created Golddust by Ashadu as a foundation. I actually founded it in Germany, but I realized that it wouldn’t be as beneficial to be here, and it would be more useful to be based in Nigeria. And so I’m in the process of closing it down here. And it’s opened in Nigeria, in Lagos, as a foundation. The idea is that I can, at some point, hopefully soon, be able to offer up funding for young filmmakers for their first productions and be sort of key in that way in supporting the works of young filmmakers in Nigeria. That’s something that I’m really, really excited about.
Is there anything else that you want to highlight?
When you speak about West Africa, people always have preconceived notions of what that means based on what they’ve picked up in the media. To be able to make the work that I do, where it just really honors our Africanness, our histories, what’s going on today and how we’re sort of dealing with that in a contemporary culture, to be able to show that not under an umbrella of pity is very important to me. We need to start changing and shifting the rhetoric of Africa as a poor continent. It’s not like that. People don’t know that, and it’s stunning to me. And so opening a little window and having people see how things are is very exciting.
No matter who or what I’m showing, whether it’s laborers who have migrated from the north to make it in the big city like Lagos, they still have pride and can hold their head and look you in the eye because my work does that. It’s always this confrontational gaze. I think it starts to sort of shift something in people. That’s very important to me; I am just getting away from this kind of pitiful consideration of what Africa is.