Tahir Carl Karmali

Tahir Karmali is a visual artist who pairs materials and portraiture to define personal narratives through the mixed mediums of photography, paper making, and installation. His expression describes economic and political accounts and pronounces them with a single material or object. Karmali’s interest in outlier communities whose identities are shaped by economic, political and social systems are transcribed into narratives describing the wide-ranging reality of the human experience. The materials he uses are dictated by the perception and value of an object in the narrative; whether it is a valued item through the eyes of a male sex worker in Nairobi or a plastic veiled apartment of a New York immigrant.

Currently, Karmali is combining digital photography and portraiture with papermaking. This allows him to deal directly with the material to craft concepts around the process and abstract how the portrait is presented. He is using this method to discuss nationality, authenticity, documentation, and borders for migrant populations in Africa. In this work takes his own Indian-Kenyan heritage to discuss colonial migrant narratives.

Tahir Karmali received a Masters in Digital Photography from the School of Visual Arts in NY in 2015. He has participated in numerous workshops and exhibited widely, including: Tracing Obsolescence, Apexart, New York, 2018; Immigrant Artists and the American West, Tacoma Art Museum, Washington, 2018; New Threads, Circle Art Gallery, Nairobi, 2018; Biennal Forografica Bogota, 2017, Bogota, Columbia and PAPER:work, Pioneer Works, New York, 2017. Karmali’s work has featured in the Addis Foto Fest, Lagos Photo Festival. In 2019, he was one of the artists commissioned to create work following the inaugural Open Call for The Shed Museum in New York.