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 paper making, 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 holds a Master's in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency. He was an artist in residence at The Watermill Center and Montello Foundation, Triangle Arts Association, Pioneer Works, Trestle Gallery, the MacDowell Colony, and BRIC.
His solo exhibitions include Eternal Rent at Management Gallery, New York (2024), and Bound Between Cliffs at Circle Art Gallery (2022). Notable group exhibitions include Water Scarcity: Perpetual Thirst at Wave Hill, New York (2022); Fictions at Circle Art Gallery (2022); 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); Second Careers at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2020); and Paper Borders at IPCNY, New York (2019).
He has participated in major art fairs including The Armory Show, New York, and the 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London (2022). This was followed by the group exhibition Eastern Voices at Addis Fine Art, London (2023), and participation in the Dakar Biennale (2024). Residencies include Montello, Nevada (2021), and the Watermill Center, New York State (2020). In 2019, Karmali was commissioned to create new work for the inaugural Open Call at The Shed, 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.
In 2025, he participated in Frieze New York and had his second solo exhibition, Hang Me Between Your Windows, at Circle Art Gallery.
