Ashadu’s films are as banal as they are overwrought with glib signifiers. Take King of Boys, a five-minute survey of butchery in a meat market in the slums of Lagos. The document is trivial on the face of it: knives hack through meat in the open-air stalls, yet not even their unsanitary conditions are worthy of note. Ashadu captured this scene through a piece of translucent red plastic, as though that somehow bestowed it with significance. She is aware of the filmic tradition borne out of such images yet is unable to advance it.
Next, MUSCLE, a glossy skin flick with men working out in makeshift Nigerian gyms, links vitalism and liberation. But even its message – half Riefenstahl’s Nuba, half Denis’s Beau Travail – is convoluted by a redundant sculptural installation which glibly adds capitalism to the semantic mix. Cowboy fetishises a stable boy with a scripted confession. But even its elaborate two-screen projection, which contrasts the mare’s trot with lazily composed images of the sea shore, fails to bring this non-story to a satisfactory end. All this takes too much room (five months in the institution’s programme) but offers precious little.
