Karimah Ashadu

Crystalline

With Crystalline, the Kestner Gesellschaft presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by the UK-born Nigerian artist and filmmaker Karimah Ashadu. Her training as a painter continues to shape her artistic vision: across film, sculpture, and photography, she combines a keen sensitivity to color, composition, and form with the fluid, ephemeral dynamism of the moving camera. Raised between the United Kingdom and Nigeria, Ashadu brings this dual perspective to a cinematic practice that explores the relationships between bodies and landscapes, proximity and distance. Her work focuses on urban subcultures, everyday labor, and informal economies, situating them within the socioeconomic and cultural contexts of Nigeria and its diaspora. In this exhibition, these contexts are brought into a deliberate dialogue with Germany. Ashadu gained international recognition at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024), where she was awarded the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant. Since then, she has been widely recognized as one of the leading voices in contemporary art.

Crystalline brings together older and current video works and also presents the world premiere of the film WAVES (2026), produced especially for the Kestner Gesellschaft. The film observes everyday life at an informal car wash in Lagos, run by young men who have migrated from northern Nigeria due to socio-political conflicts – caught between the Atlantic Ocean and the rapid urban expansion of the Oniru district, where sea areas are being reclaimed for luxury high-rise buildings. Ashadu links migration and displacement with the staging of masculinity and the vulnerability of a precarious working class; water becomes both a scarce commodity and a historically charged symbol – the Atlantic Ocean as a witness to colonial history and postcolonial present.

Karimah Ashadu (b. 1985, London; lives in Hamburg, Germany) studied from 2007 to 2016 at the School of Arts and Communication at the University of Reading, Berkshire; Chelsea College of Art and Design, London; and De Ateliers, Amsterdam. In 2026, she is the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft. That same year, an exhibition previously presented at the Camden Art Centre, London (2025), will travel to the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. She has participated in group exhibitions at, among other venues, the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2026); the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025); MoMA PS1, New York (2025); Canal Projects, New York (2025); the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024); the Kunsthalle Bremen (2022); the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2021); and the Taipei Biennial 2020, Taiwan. Ashadu is the recipient of the Lichtwark Prize of the City of Hamburg (2025); the Silver Lion for a Promising Young artist at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024); the Böttcherstraße Prize, Bremen (2022); and the ars viva Prize (2020). Her work is held in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Federal Republic of Germany’s Collection of Contemporary Art.

Kestner Gesellschaft opens Crystalline, a solo exhibition by Karimah Ashadu, on Friday, August 28, 2026, at 7 pm.

Save the Date
On Friday, November 13, 2026, at 6 pm, an Artist Talk with Karimah Ashadu will take place in conjunction with the exhibition.