Karimah Ashadu: Machine Boys

About This Event

An 8-minute, 50-second film from an artist who just won the Silver Lion at the 2024 Venice Biennale — following Lagos motorcycle-taxi drivers navigating a government ban on their own livelihood.

Karimah Ashadu is a British-born, Lagos-based artist and filmmaker whose work circles labor, masculinity, and economic precarity, usually shot on the ground in West Africa rather than about it from a distance. 'Machine Boys' follows 'okada' riders — many of them young men who migrated to Lagos from Nigeria's agrarian north — as a government crackdown threatens to erase the only work they have. At Venice, the film was shown alongside a brass sculpture called 'Wreath'; the Biennale jury singled out Ashadu's 'searing intimacy' and her ability to critique the performance of masculinity even while filming it up close.

Worth knowing: it's a single-channel video with sound, included with general admission, and the Art Institute hasn't published a closing date as of this writing — if you're making a special trip for this one specifically, call ahead or check artic.edu first.