Tahir Carl Karmali
PAPER:work sculptures, 2017-ongoing
PAPER:work sound installation, 2017
Old visa and travel documents are shredded and submerged in water forming a pulp that is then filtered to make new, recycled paper that makes up the material in PAPER:work. I pull from my own application documents for the visas I need to travel the globe as a Kenyan citizen, copies of my family’s documents, and blank asylum application documents. The process of dissolution and reformation mirrors the bureaucratic processes imposed upon people traveling and living across multiple borders. It is a metaphor used to question the notions of authenticity and nationality that govern borders and further inculcate practices of neocolonialism. It demonstrates how a person’s history and identity are distilled to compose a wholly distinctive entity who is deemed by the state legally permitted to move between borders.
This project began as a way to make sense of what nationality meant to me and how my life was contingent on the borders I was born between. It unfolded in tandem with my artist visa application for the United States. I started looking at my great-grandfather’s ID documents from when he was migrating to Kenya from North India in the 1890’s. I became interested in the paperwork and how these documents changed after Kenyan independence in 1963. It was while sifting through these old documents that I became aware of how much paperwork had authority over my family and myself. The personal handling of my family’s historical paperwork is translated directly into my artistic work as I watch identities be taken apart and compressed as with the papermaking process.
PAPER:work sculptures are larger-than-life proofs of a single family’s history with bureaucracy. The series ultimately questions the neocolonialist bureaucratic method as a way to exert control over people—whether singular persons, or whole nations. The effective immobilization of large groups has colonial roots in that it limits or halts their freedom entirely.
Artwork description courtesy of the artist
Tahir Carl Karmali, PAPER:work installation in Newburg, New York, 2019. Handmade paper pulped from photocopied government-issued identification documents and commercial paper, with aluminum mesh 11h x 35l x 8w feet. Images courtesy of the artist.
About the Artist
Tahir Carl Karmali (b. 1987, Nairobi, Kenya) is an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is primarily an investigator of materials and their underlying source – as currency, as markers of cultural identity, or as exploitable artifact. He is invested in transforming these materials into varying formats (sculptural installations, prints, textile works) that are deceptively beautiful or attractive, as an art form, allowing the viewer to savor them as primary material before a layer of trauma (of migration, of displacement) reveals itself slowly.
Karmali’s work is based not only on my own physical experience of moving between borders, and globally diverse cultures, but also on how certain elemental materials move through these same routes and are thus transformed per their use value in each space, including within the art world.
He received a Masters in Digital Photography from School of Visual Arts, New York and a BBA Marketing and Communications degree from Les Roches, Switzerland.
Karmali’s awards, residencies and grants include a Montello Foundation residence Nevada, BRIClab with ThoughtThought.us Collective, Watermill Center Residency, Key Holder Resident at Lower East Side Printshop, Pollock-Krasner Artist Grant 2019 – 2020, OPEN CALL – The Shed Commission, Triangle Artist Residency, Forbes 30 Under 30 Arts & Style, Pioneer Works Visual Artist Residency, Trestle Gallery Visiting Visual Artist Residency, MacDowell Visual Artist Residency, BRIC visual artist in residency summer 2016, IPA – International Photography Awards – Honorable Mention Professional Fine Art Collage, International Contemporary African Photography awards: POPCAP’ 2015 /Jua Kali, Candidate at The New York Times Portfolio Review, Editor’s Choice Selection for GuatePhoto 2015 /Displaced, Kuona Trust Conceptual Exhibit Grant for “Jua Kali”
His solo exhibitions include “PAPERwork” STRONGROOM, Newburg, NY; “Fibers of Being” LKB Gallery, Hamburg, Germany; “Paper Planes” Sotheby’s Institute, New York, NY; “PAPER:work”, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York; “Value” Exhibition at Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn, New York; “Jua Kali” Exhibition at United Photo Industries, Brooklyn, New York; “Untitled” – Art Cabinet, Nairobi, Kenya; “Jua Kali” – Exhibition at Kuona Trust Arts Centre, Nairobi, Kenya; “Value” – Exhibition at Kuona Trust Arts Centre, Nairobi, Kenya