Karimah Ashadu

Crystalline

Crystalline is the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by the British-born Nigerian artist and filmmaker Karimah Ashadu. Her training as a painter still shapes the way she looks: across film, sculpture and photography, a feeling for colour and composition meets the restless, fleeting movement of her camera. Ashadu grew up between the two countries, and this dual belonging runs through her cinematic work. Her subjects are urban subcultures, everyday labour and informal economies within the socio-economic and cultural context of Nigeria and its diaspora — a context she sets in dialogue with Hanover and Hamburg. She came to wider attention at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024), where she was awarded the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Participant.

At the centre of the exhibition is the world premiere of WAVES (2026), a film co-produced specifically for the Kestner Gesellschaft, shown alongside new photographs, a sculpture and the older video work Cowboy (2022). WAVES follows a day's work at a makeshift car wash in Lagos, run by young men displaced from northern Nigeria by political conflict. The site is wedged between the sea and the rapid expansion of the Oniru district, where stretches of water are being filled in to make room for luxury high-rises. Ashadu draws together the experience of uprooting and displacement, the performance of masculinity, and the vulnerability of a precarious working class. Water is at once a working material and a scarce commodity here — and the Atlantic they wash beside remains the ocean of colonial trade routes.

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.