Tahir Karmali (Kenyan b. 1987)
Lives and works in New York
Tahir Karmali is primarily an investigator of materials and vernacular design. Living and working in New York, he reflects on the underlying sources of material as currency, marker of cultural identity, or exploitable artefact. By transforming materials into deceptively beautiful art forms (sculptural installations, prints, textile works), Karmali allows the viewer to savour their primary materiality before a layer of trauma (of migration, displacement, labour) slowly reveals itself. Informed by personal experiences of migration and immigration, Karmali’s work explores how certain materials transition through diverse cultures and are thus transformed, according to their use in space, especially in the art world.
Karmali has combined digital photography and portraiture with papermaking, allowing him to deal directly with material and craft concepts around process and the abstraction of presentation to discuss nationality, authenticity, documentation and borders. Elsewhere, he uses silk fibres as a way to represent the body, seeking to express the effects of inflicted violence. In various constructions, tension is created between the delicacy of silk with the aggression of steel sheets and metal bolts.
Karmali received a MA in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2015. Selected solo and group exhibitions include: Water Scarcity: Perpetual Thirst, Wave Hill, New York, 2022; Bound Between Cliffs, a solo show at Circle Art Gallery, 2022; Fictions, Circle Art Gallery, 2022; Heimaten, Museum für Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2021; Omniscient: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, 2021; Second Careers, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2020; Paper Boarders, IPCNY, New York, 2019. Karmali was commissioned to create work following the inaugural Open Call for The Shed Museum in New York in 2019. Recent residencies include Montelo, Nevada, 2020 and the Watermill Centre, New York State, 2021. In 2022 he exhibited at The Armory Show in New York and 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair in London. Karmali’s work Swallowing Soil (The Scream 2) has been selected to be displayed at The Rockefeller Foundation's headquarters in New York, following his participation at The Armory Show in 2022.