As Apartman No: 26, we are visiting Karimah Ashadu: Tendered, one of the most talked-about exhibitions of the season, with only a few days left until its closing on March 22. Having won the Silver Lion for “Promising Young Artist” at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Ashadu, in her first institutional solo show in the United Kingdom, reimagines the social fabric at the heart of Nigeria through muscle, sweat, and steel.
At the center of the exhibition is the newly commissioned moving-image installation MUSCLE (2025), making its premiere at Camden Art Centre. It offers an intimate portrait of bodybuilders in makeshift open-air gyms on the outskirts of Lagos, striving toward a hyper-masculine ideal. Yet Ashadu’s camera does not treat these muscles merely as aesthetic objects; it interrogates the socio-economic struggle for independence behind them and questions the patriarchal structures embedded in West African culture. Sculptures that seem to spill out from the film into the gallery space physically immerse the viewer in the atmosphere of the work.
Ashadu’s cinematic language is nourished by a strong sense of color and composition inherited from her background as a painter. In her lens, Lagos becomes a living organism — stretching from slaughterhouse labor (as in King of Boys) to horse grooms (Cowboy) — narrating the thin line between postcolonial economic exploitation and dignity. Rejecting the distant, exoticizing ethnographic gaze of the colonial era, the artist — as someone living in the diaspora — establishes an empathetic closeness. This closeness reveals the contemporary echoes of Nigerian history as burdens carried by people and landscapes alike.
The exhibition is not limited to visuals; it is enriched with performances that expand the layers of Ashadu’s practice. If your schedule allows, we highly recommend not missing the special event early next week:
Agenda Note: Tuesday, March 17
Performance and Spoken Word: Gasp, Growl, Grunt, Sign, Yawn
Time: 19:00 – 20:30
Venue: Camden Art Centre
While adding this exhibition to our Apartman No: 26 must-see list, we are reminded once again that Ashadu’s success is no accident. The fugitive kinetic energy in her camera succeeds in melting together both the fragility and the unyielding strength of postcolonial Nigeria within the same frame.
