Halim Al Karim

Halim Al Karim (b. 1963, Najaf, Iraq) is an Iraqi artist who lives in Denver and Dubai. He works mainly in photography, making large Lambda and archival pigment prints. The images are blurred, out of focus or veiled, and some prints hang under a layer of stretched silk. He also works with film, painting and artefacts.

Trained first in ceramics, he took a BA at the Baghdad Academy of Fine Arts in 1988 and studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1996 to 2000. "Hidden" has been a theme of his photography since 1985, as in the triptych Hidden Theme (1995). The work draws on Sufism and Sumerian epics and often shows women raised to the rank of goddesses.

In 2011 Iraq returned to the Venice Biennale after thirty-six years, and Al Karim was one of the six artists in its pavilion. He showed Witness from Baghdad at Darat al Funun, Amman, in 2010. Group exhibitions followed at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, in 2012 and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2021. His work is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mori Art Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, and the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art, Doha.