Tahir Karmali: Hang Me Between Your Windows: Circle Art Gallery

Consider, the space between windows in the house is prominent, a place of honour.

Consider, there is a throughline between the body and the land. Blood becomes red soil. iron to iron, dust to dust

Consider, the body your first home, the land the only home, and time the slim veil between these twin bodies.

For Tahir Karmali, the idea of the body takes on multiple meanings in his practice— exemplified by his use of material and the ideas that the bodies that he conjures move through.

His exhibitions are a melding of flesh, earth and plant matter into a body of work, where each component is a cell, an organ, a window into the artist’s interior world. Hang Me Between Your Windows continues in the artist’s manifestations of intimacy, but takes a new approach to form and process. Accessibility, both in the scale and shape of the work further break down the barrier to contact between the artist and his audience. Intimacy intensifies reality, and with the rise of global fascism, with its devastating wars, extraction, disconnection, cynicism and dissociation, tracing the intimacies between the body, the land and the living world becomes a radical act towards connection.

Where previously the artist’s visceral contentions with landscape, geology, labour, migration and belonging played out in installations that covered walls and draped from ceilings, here Karmali begins by inverting the scale. Works on paper and sculpture place their weight in their ability to transport the viewer inward, offering the opportunity to share in groundedness. He concentrates the emotion and detail emblematic of his style into monoprints; the thread of intimacy made that much more palpable. Like blood cells in an artery, and nearly as numerous, the prints run parallel to one another along the midline of the gallery walls. Red prints in red frames are tempered by tiny brown-framed abstractions floating on off-white mounting and awash with colour. One set of prints evokes the ever-present blood of Karmali’s compositions, the other a dreamlike journey through landscapes. The visceral dances with the emotional, the paper forming a perfect substrate to lay it all bare.

Deeper into the gallery, the artist employs favoured material, silk shirts, steel, and stone in a series of sculptures. Two sets of steel ribs modelled on the artist’s own body hang open, a silk shirt like a membrane falling through them. The protein fibres spun by diligent silkworms to hold themselves secure as they morph take up red oxide dye in the pinks of flesh. Three more dyed shirts draped in a cascade feel like the underside of skin. Each shirt holds the next shirt open, as if to say come closer, look inside me. Another series of shirts adorn the walls, hung on t-bars wide as the artist’s shoulders, and held in place by stones foraged at a local construction site.

To bring this body of work to fruition, Karmali rearticulated his process from one of catharsis, an externalized release, to the meditative; accessed through physically demanding gestures. The creation of the monoprints and the sculptures necessitated repetitive physical contact, much like the maintenance we do for our bodies. Working over a month, Karmali’s colourful monotypes emerged in eights, day after day, in a process led by feeling and muscle memory. The dyeing of the silk shirts with red oxide and soy milk continued this process of physical immersion and labour, culminating in fleshy hand painted garments cradled in steel the artist bent and twisted himself. Unlike previous bodies of work, this process was additive, and seemed to multiply and expand his internal reserves. Perhaps, an artist does not have to suffer in their work. Perhaps, the work can reseed the body it grew from.

Karmali has exhibited prolifically across continents, in both solo and group shows. Notable exhibitions include the solo exhibitions Eternal Rent at Management Gallery, New York, Bound Between Cliffs at Circle and The Wake, the 2024 edition of Dak'art Biennale, Senegal. Karmali has also exhibited in group shows at Kunsthal Rotterdam, Blanton Museum, Houston; CCCB, Barcelona; Guggenheim Bilbao and elsewhere.

Karmali (b. 1987 in Nairobi, Kenya, works in Brooklyn, NY) 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.