Mumtaz Karimjee was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India in 1950. She grew up in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) and moved to England at the age of 11, later studying Modern Languages as a mature student. Without formal training, she made considerable contributions to photography in the 1980s–90s, exploring themes of racial, gender and sexual identity.
Photographer, curator and writer, Mumtaz Karimjee was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India in 1950. She grew up in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), and, after the country gained independence from the British Empire, moved to the UK with her family circa 1962 at the age of 11. She completed her O Levels in Sussex and attended secretarial college in London and then worked, before returning to higher education as a mature student. She completed her BA (Hons) in Modern Languages (Chinese and German) at the Polytechnic of Central London between 1976 and 1982. While doing a course on China at the Polytechnic she made extended field-trips abroad, studying at Beijing University (1978–9) and then Nanjin University (1980–1). While there she used a camera to record what she observed, and produced two important bodies of work, one documenting women in contemporary Chinese society, and the other exploring the poetic as a mode of contestation. For instance, Women in China 1949-1985, her essay combining image and text, showed the ways in which women were central to Chinese society (Correia, SADAA; Gupta, 1996).
After completing her studies, Karimjee worked towards establishing herself as a photographer. The ‘critical moment’ which she identified in her career was 1983, when she was included in the exhibition Black Women Time Now at the Battersea Arts Centre, London, curated by Lubaina Himid. At that time, Black women artists had very little exposure and were often excluded from critical conversations in the visual arts (Correia, SADAA). The exhibition signalled a change in this regard for Karimjee, and she continued to exhibit in subsequent group shows that allowed her to align herself to feminist artists of colour, such as Jagrati: Asian Women Artists at Greenwich Citizen Gallery, Woolwich in 1986. At the same time, she contributed to the magazine, Mukti, produced by a collective of diasporic South Asian women who aimed to voice the concerns of a broad female community in Britain and to challenge the objectifying imagery of Black and South Asian women in the popular media of the time. Karimjee also wrote articles for Ten:8, a photography magazine based in Birmingham, between 1979 and 1992.
Alongside writing and group exhibitions, throughout the latter half of the 1980s Karimjee began organising exhibitions and holding solo shows that explored her own identity. In 1986, with Amina Patel, Manjula Mukherjee and Vibha Osbon, Karimjee organised the exhibition Aurat Shakti at the Cockpit Gallery, London, and touring. She also curated Four Indian Women Photographers, the first of its kind in the UK, at Horizon Gallery and coordinated the Spectrum Women’s Photography Festival at Sisterwrite Gallery, both held in London between 1987–88. Her series My Mothers My Sisters, comprised of black and white documentary images of women and girls taken during a trip to India and funded by the Women’s Solidarity Fund, was exhibited at the Sisterwrite Gallery festival, as well as in the 1989 touring exhibition Fabled Territories: New Asian Photography in Britain at City Art Gallery, Leeds. Interconnecting with this project, her series In Search of an Image sought to reflect her own sexuality and lesbian identity, and address both colonial British and South Asian attitudes towards lesbianism (Correia, SADAA; Karimjee, 1991).Discussing this series, Sunil Gupta reflected that ‘Karimjee’s work is a brave attempt to reclaim a space for herself, caught as we are in a climate of blame and the instant threat of excommunication from the culture/race. As the first published piece of ‘out’ lesbian work by a Muslim woman in this country it is historic’ (Gupta, 1996).
Karimjee’s last major artwork was Labismina: A Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse Returns from the Underworld (1992), commissioned by Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers (ABP), for inclusion in the exhibition, Mis(sed) Representations, which toured the Cave Arts Centre, Birmingham and Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool in 1992. Labismina combined songs, paintings, shadow puppetry, photographic self-portraiture, poetry, and text, drawing on ancient myths, colonial histories of violence, survivors’ testimony and contemporary scholarship, in order to address child abuse from the child’s perspective. Throughout, a narrator asserts their identity ‘as a Black survivor’ (Correia, SADAA; Karimjee and River, 1992). In the late 1990s, Karimjee moved from London to Liverpool (where she lives today), after which she became unwell. Since then, she has claimed, it has not been possible to create art in the same way, also hindered by changing political contexts and lack of access to funding (SADAA Interview). Her work is not currently represented in the UK public domain
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Mumtaz Karimjee]
Publications related to [Mumtaz Karimjee] in the Ben Uri Library