Conversations with Karimah Ashadu & Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura

A new audio work commissioned by Camden Art Centre, created by Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura in response to Karimah Ashadu’s new film MUSCLE. The piece traverses Ashadu’s musical and critical influences for her practice, BTS clips from her Lagos film shoots, and Thorlu-Bangura’s own sonic associations. Across 60 minutes of music and speech, the piece offers an alternative point of entry into Ashadu’s practice, foregrounding embodiment, labour and presence through sound rather than visual narration. MUSCLE is currently screening as part of Tendered at Camden Arts Centre, until 22nd March 2026. Watch an interview with Karimah Ashadu here. Transcriptions of the James Baldwin texts featured in the piece: One may see that the history, which is now indivisible from oneself, has been full of errors and excesses; but this is not the same thing as seeing that, for millions of people, this history-oneself-has been nothing but an intolerable yoke, a stinking prison, a shrieking grave. […] [A]nd whatever this history may have given to the subjugated is of absolutely no value, since they have never been freе to reject it; they will never even be able to assess it until they are free to take from it what they need, and to add to history the monumental fact of their presence. […] Their apprehension of this history cannot fail to reveal to them that they have been robbed, maligned, and rejected: to bow down before that history is to accept that history's arrogant and unjust judgment.