Karimah Ashadu — Crystalline

A found copper water tank, drawn on in one sitting with a line portrait of a man from the film, is the smallest object in Crystalline and the one that explains it. Ashadu calls it Auric Field. It stood outside an informal car wash in Oniru, Lagos, on a strip of land reclaimed from the Atlantic within the last few years, and it does the same work in a gallery that it did in the yard: hold water, mark labor, gather value by being looked at differently. The exhibition is her first institutional solo in Germany. It opens at Kestner Gesellschaft on August 28 and premieres WAVES (2026) in the domed hall of the Goseriedebad, a former public bathhouse. The film follows men washing cars between the lot and the ocean while their voices, in Hausa, account for what brought them south. Eight life-size photographs of the same men, wearing counterfeit designer clothing, have been worked with saltwater, ink, pigment and bleach; as the water evaporates, salt crystals grow across the faces. She took the Silver Lion at Venice in 2024, and Chicago follows in September with shows at the Renaissance Society and the Art Institute. The gap is that the room has priced the prizes and not yet the pictures.