Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant in Foreigners Everywhere
Motivation: “Karimah Ashadu with her video Machine Boys and related brass sculpture, Wreath, upends gendered assumptions about the gaze and what is considered proper to commemorate. With a searing intimacy, she captures the vulnerability of young men from the agrarian north of Nigeria who have migrated to Lagos and end up riding illegal motorbike taxis. Her feminist camera lens is extraordinarily sensitive and intimate, capturing the bikers’ subcultural experience as well as their economic precarity. Masterfully edited to draw out yet subtly critique the performance of masculinity on display, her sensual attention to surfaces of machine, flesh, and cloth reveals the rider’s marginal existence.”
A Painter-turned-videomaker, Karimah Ashadu dedicates precise spaces to artistic elaboration on top of what may initially – and technically – look like a documentary. Scenes of working life, especially open-air work, may seem a strictly observational exercise, finely polished though it may be, up to the point creative intervention appears, delicate as much as it is clearly thought out.
In 2022 Karimah Ashadu participated in the exhibition Penumbra organized by In Between Art Film at Complesso dell’Ospedaletto.
