The artist and TikTok star Vita Kari loyally attends Art Basel in Miami Beach. Last year, the police were called to intervene in a stunt Kari staged outside the main fair, frantically begging people to pour water into the clear trash can in which they had trapped themself. This year Kari is making their debut inside a fair with a duo stand at the Untitled Art fair, with Yiwei Gallery, showcasing their new tapestry practice.
From 2020 to 2022, Kari operated a community art space in Los Angeles, which mostly staged large-scale installations. But the artist has enjoyed greater visibility, and commercial success, on the internet. Across TikTok and Instagram, they share their clever, unhinged video series The craziest thing about being creative, each edition revealing that some unexpected part of their environs was printed out.
In a literal sense, Kari has also printed out their latest maximalist tapestries, which meld classical Moroccan patterns with contemporary architecture and avatars of the internet age, from Blackberry phones to selfies. Kari has shown some of these works at the Art021 fair in Shanghai and at Yiwei gallery. Kari weaves the works on a jacquard loom, which works like a printer, then embellishes them by hand.
Family ties
The artist has been thinking about the home through the lens of accessibility since discovering that they are deaf earlier this year. But the tapestries predominantly spring from Kari’s relationship with their grandmother, who left the Levant for the US in the 1950s.
“I was going through her things after she passed away,” Kari says. “She had these rugs that had really specific patterns, but they weren’t really salvageable.” Those patterns became a means to bridge Kari’s culture with their grandmother’s, across language, sexuality, gender identity and time—fitting fodder given Untitled’s programming theme of “East Meets West” this year.
“The series is called Her Original Pixel because the tapestry is the original pixel,” Kari says. “A screen and a tapestry function similarly, in the sense that they’re both CMYK”, a reference to the colour printing system employing cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks.
But Kari has not given up staging spectacles of the body: at 5.30pm on 7 December, they will trap themself in a bathroom on 19th Street outside the Miami Beach Convention Center in a stunt titled Close the Door.
But in an art market where mainstream appeal can attract or repel both commercial and critical success, Kari considers their arrival at Untitled this year’s real sensation. Besides, their parents both grew up and fell in love here. Kari adds: “I was emotionally conceived in Miami.”
