Halim Al-Karim IRAQI, b. 1963

Halim Al Karim is a contemporary Iraqi artist best known for his strategically blurred and altered photographs. His works merge stills from films, artifacts, photos, and paintings to present topics of past trauma, reality, and dreams. Al Karim sometimes covers the prints with a thin veil of white or black silk to further blur the images. Born in 1963 in Najaf, Iraq, he went on to study at the Baghdad Academy of Fine Arts and later the Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam. During the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s, Al Karim was drafted into the army but fled and made a dramatic escape. He tells the story of hiding for three years in a hidden hole in the desert, where he was brought food and water by a Bedouin woman—this experience understandably made a profound impact on the themes in his work, which often show veiled women as goddesses or saviors, as seen in the figures of Hidden Victims (2008). Al Karim was featured in the Iraqi Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale, and his works are in the collections of the Arab Museum of Contemporary Art in Doha, Qatar, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among others. He lives and works between Denver, CO and Dubai, UAE.