Karimah Ashadu’s MUSCLE follows bodybuilders training in Lagos, but the film is not really about bodybuilding as spectacle. It looks at the body as something that can be worked on, displayed, disciplined and turned into a form of personal capital.
The 22-minute film is part of Tendered, Ashadu’s exhibition opening at the Renaissance Society in Chicago on 12 September 2026. Her camera stays close to the men she films, avoiding the detached distance often associated with documentary observation. The result places physical training beside a much larger question about labour and autonomy in contemporary Nigeria.
What interests me is the overlap between sculpting a body and building an economic position.
Muscle is usually understood as physical strength. Here it can also represent time, discipline, aspiration and self-invention. The gym becomes a workplace even when nobody is formally paying for the hours spent there.
Video is particularly effective for this because effort has duration. A photograph can show the finished body. Moving image can show repetition, fatigue and the small routines required to produce it.
The body is not simply what the camera records.
It is where the work is happening.
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6787762/karimah-ashadutendered
