Karl Sharro (aka Karl reMarks ) is an architect, satirist and commentator on the Middle East, whose work has been featured in the BBC, Al-Jazeera, The Economist, Ted-X Talks, Wall Street Journal and Guardian among others. He is the author of And Then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News’. Karl started satirising Western portrayals of the Middle East around the time of the Arab Spring, through a series of blogposts, tweets, cartoons and videos through his alter ego ‘Karl reMarks’, such as his 2016 video ‘the simple one-sentence explanation for what caused Isis,’ which went viral, with 1.6 million views on Facebook alone.
After Brexit and the election of Trump, Karl dedicated his energy to developing his Occidentalist analysis of Western culture, drawing on the rich tradition of Orientalism which did so much to shed light on the East. In a similar vein, Karl applied this academic rigour to topics varying from football hooliganism to the Orthodox-Catholic schism.
Karl went on to found the Institute of Internet Diagrams, of which he is the only employee, taking his work into the realms of cartography and data visualization to redraw the boundaries of Western Europe or uncover the link between the quality of food and governance.
Keen to enlighten his Western audience, Karl eventually took his show on the road, visiting a number of Western universities such as Oxford University, the LSE and Yale. He has also performed in obscure Occidental locations such as Berlin, Paris and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.