Karimah Ashadu on her Venice Biennale Debut Win and Creating from the Mundane

When Karimah Ashadu debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale, she didn’t think she would leave with a prize. It wasn’t the sort of thing she imagined would happen to an artist who has continuously gone against the grain in how she creates and facilitates her work as an artist.

“I've been doing this [for] a long time on my own. I've had to carve out my group of trusted people around me. I shied away from doing things the normal way,” she tells OkayAfrica in an interview.

When the jury called to notify her that her work would be recognised, she initially thought it would be for a special mention and “was so happy with that,” but found herself floored when she was announced as the winner of the Silver Lion award for a Promising Young Artist in the International Exhibition. “I couldn't honestly believe it,” she says, adding that the recognition was a pat on the back, and years of work and self-reliance paying off.

It’s a cold, rainy day in early May and I am meeting Ashadu in her home in Lagos. The soft-spoken, 38-year old artist flew to her studio in Hamburg after the Biennale and has now returned to Lagos where she finds rest and most importantly, inspiration. “It’s where I come to recharge my batteries,” she says. “It is where I get a lot of my creative energy from and you know, I grew up here, so It's like, active rest.”

The making of an award-winning artwork

With her relationship with Lagos, it is no surprise that it is a strong feature in her work. For her installation at the Biennale, Ashadu made a 70kg (154lb) bronze sculpture, titled Wreath, depicting a relief of motorcycle tyres. In addition to Wreath, she also made a film focused on motorcycle taxi (known colloquially as okada) riders in Lagos, showing the intersections of their lives with policies, aspirations, and financial autonomy. Titled Machine Boys, Ashadu spent nearly three years producing what ended up being an eight-minute film installation situated in a purple room. According to the official statement, the motorcyclists included in the project, “Embody a particular branch of masculinity, and in this performance, a beautiful vulnerability emerges, questioning Nigeria’s patriarchal culture. Through this exploration of Nigerian patriarchal ideals, Ashadu relates its performance of masculinity to the vulnerability of a precarious class of workers.”

“I'm very inspired by people watching and trying to figure out what makes people tick, and so what people will probably not see as anything special is enticing [to me]. And Lagos provides a lot of that. And the okada guys are in that thread,” says Ashadu. She found herself returning to an observation of the motorcyclists, an observation that gradually developed into a repetitive, mental imagery that typically starts off most of her projects.

Finding her artistic vision

Ashadu’s work cuts across various mediums, including film, sound, sculptures, and painting. But they are also undergirded by some of her most prominent sentiments, including her dedication to interrogating the mundane, and her undying fascination with Nigeria. Of her childhood and fundamental years, she says “I left and then I came back. And it was about finding myself in the landscape of Nigeria again and my work was a way for me to understand that,” she says.

Growing up in a small, middle-class family, Ashadu was always reading. It is no wonder that her works feature a storyteller’s sensibility, a propensity for complete world-building, even when working within small artistic containers. For instance, in her 2020 installation of sculptures titled, Brown Goods: Sculptures, after her film Brown Goods, windows from a Mercedes car, as well as windscreens from a Porsche, hang from the space of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, casting on the mind, questions of opposing values, of delicate balance, and the many themes of class, power, vanity, all layered into it.

Of her films, she relays, “Although I'm very intentional with how it looks, I edit the work myself and that for me is a very sculptural thing because I'm building the image and visual language of the work that is driven by instinct.”

At the moment, Ashadu is working on her first narrative project, where she’s shifting her gaze from the unpredictable narrative potential of experimental filmmaking, to the linearity of scripted works. “It's a huge challenge for me because I'm not a trained filmmaker, I'm not a trained writer, I just kind of do whatever I'm called to do and I figure out my way of doing it. And that's the way that I've approached the script. But when it comes to narrative storytelling, there’s a container that you have to respect. So, you do have to observe certain practices because at the end of the day, you're presenting a way of storytelling and people need to understand how to read that,” she says.

Despite all of her acclaim, Ashadu still gets nervous at the start of a project. And for her, this is a necessary tool. “I always want to be a bit nervous, I never want to feel like, ‘Oh I've got this,’ you know? I always want to feel like, ‘Oh shoot, how is this? Is it going to be good?’ It keeps me on my toes.”