An Evening with Karimah Ashadu
Karimah Ashadu, Plateau, 2021-2022. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ
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.
Followed by a conversation between Karimah Ashadu and Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Art Institute of Chicago.
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).
2015–22, Nigeria/Germany
In Berom and English with English subtitles
Format: Digital
ca. 50 min.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Karimah Ashadu is a British-born Nigerian artist and film director living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Her work has been presented internationally at the Venice Biennale, Camden Art Centre, Canal Projects, MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, Secession, Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions. She received the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant at the 2024 Venice Biennale, as well as the 2025 Lichtwark-Förderpreis from the City of Hamburg, the 2022 Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße, and the 2020 ars viva prize. Ashadu founded the production company Golddust by Ashadu in 2020, specializing in artists’ films engaging Black culture and African discourses. In 2026, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of the Arts London.
PROGRAM
Notes adapted from the artist’s website
King of Boys (Abattoir of Makoko)
2015, 5 min.
“King of Boys” is a Lagos street term for a man who controls a particular territory or group of “area boys.” Set in Makoko’s outdoor abattoir, the film observes men butchering the heads of bulls and rams with heavy axes and knives, their precise and repeated movements producing a dense visual and aural rhythm. Ashadu filmed the scene using a filter constructed from a found red beer keg. As the camera mechanism turns, the image shifts between an unfiltered view of the abattoir and a dreamlike red world, foregrounding the ways color, perspective, and the camera itself shape what the viewer sees.
Brown Goods
2020, 12 min.
“Brown Goods” is a commonly used term for electronic consumer products—a play on words that introduces the film’s intertwined concerns with race and value. The film follows Emeka, a Nigerian migrant whose status prevents him from working officially in Germany. On Hamburg’s Billstraße, he earns a living trading secondhand electrical goods destined for export to West Africa. Through Emeka’s work, Ashadu enters a complex circuit of people, commodities, and capital linking European consumption to African markets, while considering migration, racialized value, and the determination to remain self-sufficient within a system that restricts his movement and labor.
Plateau
2021–22, 30 min.
“Plateau is a work of tremendous concreteness, anchored in the materiality of mining . . . the texture of earth as it melts into muck.” —Erika Balsom, Open Shields, 2021
Plateau profiles a group of undocumented tin miners in Nigeria’s Plateau State and considers the social, economic, and environmental consequences of their work. Under British colonial rule, foreign companies extensively exploited the region’s deposits of tin and columbite. When many of these companies ceased operations in the late 1970s and 1980s, displaced workers formed small mining communities, passing their knowledge to subsequent generations as a means of pursuing economic independence. Today, mining continues with rudimentary equipment and little oversight, exposing workers, residents, and the surrounding ecosystem to grave risks. Ashadu situates the miners’ ingenuity and self-determination within a landscape marked by the enduring damage of colonial extraction and industrial abandonment.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu.
TICKETS
$14 General public
$9 Students & seniors
$8 Film Center members
$8 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID
All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.
RESOURCE GUIDES
Articles, interviews, and other material related to upcoming artists and events. Coming soon.