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 an MA in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2015. His solo exhibitions include Bound Between Cliffs at Circle Art Gallery in 2022, and Eternal Rent at Management Gallery, New York, in 2024. Notable group exhibitions include Paper Borders at IPCNY, New York, 2019; Second Careers at the Cleveland Museum of Art 2020; Omniscient: Queer Documentation in an Image Culture at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York, 2021; Heimaten at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, 2021; Fictions at Circle Art Gallery, 2022; and Water Scarcity: Perpetual Thirst at Wave Hill, New York, 2022. He also participated in The Armory Show in New York and the 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London in 2022, followed by the group show Eastern Voices at Addis Fine Art, London in 2023, and the Dakar Biennale in 2024. This Frieze New York.
In 2022, his work Swallowing Soil (The Scream 2) was selected for display at The Rockefeller Foundation’s headquarters in New York following his participation in The Armory Show. Karmali was commissioned in 2019 to create new work for the inaugural Open Call at The Shed Museum in New York. His recent artist residencies include Montello, Nevada, 2020, and the Watermill Center in New York State, 2021.
