Contemporary Iraqi artist, Halim Al-Karim reveals social injustice that is happening in his country at the present time. Unlike the customary recording methods, he documents the suffering and the desolation with images of psychological expressions. Under a layer of mist, he illustrates the veiled emotions of the Iraqi women. He draws attention to the hidden, as they are still hidden in his art.
Much of his influences came from his background, culture and family. Al-Karim was born in Najaf, Iran in 1963. His family then moved to the capital city of Iraq, Baghdad, ten years later in 1973. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad and the Ritveld Academy in Amsterdam.[1] When Al-Karim was a child, he watched as his father spent many hours in the darkroom. His uncle was the curator for the National Museum of Iraq, so Al-Karim was well exposed to the Mesopotamian art of the Sumerian period.
Halim Al-Karim, Hidden Prisoner, 1993, Lamboda print 158 x 369cm
Hidden Prisoner displays his historical reference to Iranian ancient history to reveal the status of today. These images of Mesopotamian sculpture, he photographed in the Louvre and the British Museum.[2] They are out of focus, and are taken behind glass. The images are extremely blurry, yet the viewer can still define the subject. The sculptures are ambassadors for his people at home. Similar to the enclosed glass box that the sculptures are placed in, some of his closest family and friends were in prison under the regime of Saddam. In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, his family was forced out of Iraq for being supporters of the Iranian Revolution against Saddam’s dictatorship. Al-Karim’s brother, Sami, was imprisoned and tortured. Sami was later released from Abu Ghraib prison in 1989.[3]
Halim Al-Karim opposed Saddam’s mandatory military services. He ran away to the desert, hiding himself under a rock cave for three years. For those three years, a Bedouin woman supplied him with food and water. Because of her kindness, he was able to live and learn the spiritual and mystic customs of the gypsy.[4] The Mesopotamia sculptures and artifacts that he photographed are pious elites with large eyes seeking truth, just as Al-Karim searches for hope through spiritual awareness. Al-Karim blurs the image to convey the process and struggle to find hope, truth, and an escape from the current situation for himself as refugee and also for his country under the political unrest. Through the foggy finish, viewers become an archeologist, digging through the obscurity of lines to seek his message.
The viewer must take part in the visualizing process. Looking at his images, the eye automatically tries to define the vague lines to make sense of it. Western contemporary artist, Bill Armstrong, is another pioneer in photographic abstraction. He is fascinated by the physiology of the vision. It is a phenomenon, in which “we can believe something is real, while at the same time knowing it is illusory; that the experience of visual confusion, when the psyche is momentarily derailed, is what frees us to respond emotionally.”[5] Al-Karim’s images utilize this momentarily derailed mind to share his emotions, steering the viewer towards a particular feeling towards his subject matter.
Hidden Love 5, 2009, Lambda print on aluminum, 67 x 47 inches (170 x 120 cm)
In another series of photographs, Hidden Love, Al-Karim shoots a number of portraits of young ladies masked in a bright color. Their lips are darkened as they are sealed. He photographs the models in black and white film through a silken scrim. He then adds color to the back of the negatives.[6] According to the artist, the vivid “soul color” portrays the potential of the individual to “arise beyond oppression in the truth of absolute love.”[7] Like his other series, he blurs the pictures but this time he leaves the eyes clear and sharp. Details of the eye are very precise. Each vein and highlights are visible. During his direst time in the desert, the kindness he saw in the eyes of the women who aided him was what kept him alive. Hidden Love, he dedicates as “a form of self-preservation and an act of resistance, a mentality adopted by many Iraqis… You are witnessing this violence and you cannot talk about it, yet you cannot hide the beauty of your soul which appears through your eyes.”[8]
There is a striking and eerie juxtaposition between the detailed and the blurred. His uses of color and features of the eyes are beautiful, yet it is still unsettling to observe. Al-Karim creates this unsettling atmosphere to convey the perturbing and distressing status the Iraqis have to live with, within their home country. These women are faded and blurred into the background. Before and even since the revolution, they still carry on unnoticed. Even through the veil, Al-Karim notices the deep sorrow and bitterness for being unvoiced and their lips sealed under the dictatorship of Saddam.
On the flip side, Al-Karim creates triptychs using film stills. Among the three photos, Saddam Hussein’s face is distorted and blurred like the two faces besides him.
Halim Al-Karim, Hidden Faces, 1995, Lambda print, 138 x 300 cm
During the war in Iraq, “media were corrupted … as a result, pictures were manipulated and were either used as a weapon or were hidden in order to conceal the ubiquity of justice.”[9] Al-Karim, in turns, manipulates the images of the hands that corrupted the media in order to reveal and release the ubiquity of injustice.
This triptych was created years before 2003 when the photo of Saddam in custody was released. Al-Karim expresses Saddam’s disengaging connection with the people. The Iraqi’s dictator’s motives was unclear to the people, and his promises of freedom to the people were unmet. The artist describes how“…the situation was really out of focus. The government pushed us to become part of their machine, with the goal of stripping us of our humanity and values. Day by day, year by year, we were confused and distrustful of everyone.” [10] Saddam’s face is submerging with the background to illustrate the lack of compassion and his ineffectiveness to help his impoverished people. The two supporting images on both sides of Saddam are too burred to be recognizable. In those two images, Al-Karim portrays world leaders who supported Saddam’s power. He illustrates their “duplicity of their motives, scripting them as anonymous accomplices who will never stand trial.”[11]
In Lyle Rexter’s book, The Edge of Vision, The Rise of Abstraction in Photography, Rexter claims that photography can reveal another dimension of reality to discover something about humanity today. Through the abstract features of the art piece, a truth can expose itself. Photography in fine art has gained liberty to emancipate from its documentary foundations, to shift the focuses “from cultural and formal aspects of photography to epistemological, technological, psychological, and material underpinnings.”[12] The clarity and accuracy of the image becomes of second importance. The artist can frugally reveal an image to request the imagination of the viewer to complete the idea. Using his photographic abstractionist style, Harim Al-Karim communicates his concerns of a particular dimension of reality; “the impact of wars and the related pursuit of truth and humanity.”[13]
Halim Al-Karim, forces the viewer to see through a fog of ambiguity, forcing the viewers to seek the truth and clarity that “was lost in hopes of regaining it in the annals of our memories.”[14] Al-Karim’s work stands as a monument, recording the effects of the war and to warn the future generation from falling into the same pattern of ignorance.
Bibliography
Al-Karim, Halim. Artist. Hidden Faces. Photograph.1995, From The Saatchi Gallery_London Contemporary Art Gallery. Accessed March 23, 2012. http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/ artpages/halim_karim_hidden_face.htm.
Al-Karim, Halim. Artist, Hidden Love 5. Photograph. 2009. From Stux Gallery. http://www.stuxgallery.com/www/artist_gallery /55/1297.
Al-Karim, Halim. Artist, Hidden Prisoner. Photograph. 1993. From The Saatchi Gallery- London Contemporary Art Gallery. Accessed March 23, 2012. http://www.saatchigallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/halim_karim_hidden_prisoner.htm.
Armstrong, Bill. “The Infinity Series,” statement on Bill Armstrong Photography. Accessed March 19, 2012. http://www.billarmstrongphotography .com/statement.html.
Bio of Halim Alkarim, Art in Embassies: U.S. Department of State. Accessed March22, 2012. http://art.state.gov/artistdetail.aspx?id =137640.
“Halim Al Karim Witness from Baghad” New York, October 24 2011, Art Media Agency, accessed March 23, 2012. http://www.artmediaagency.com/en/tag/halim-al-karim/.
“Innovative Artist Halim Al-Karim,” Eyes In, December 22, 2012, accessed March 20, 2012, http://www.eyesin.com/artists/2011/innovative-artist-halim-al-karim/.
Madeline Yale, Halim AlKarim: Photographic Abstraction and the Lag Effects of Conflict in Iraq, Contemporary Practices: Visual Arts from the Middle East. Volume VIIIhttp://www.contemporarypractices.net/essays/volumeVIII/halimalKarim.pdf.
Rexler, Lyle. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. New York: Aperture, 2009.
[4] Bio of Halim Alkarim, Art in Embassies: U.S. Department of State.
[7] “Innovative Artist Halim Al-Karim.”
[8] Yale, Halim AlKarim: Photographic Abstraction and the Lag Effects of Conflict in Iraq. 157.
[12] Lyle Rexler, The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. (New York: Aperture, 2009), 145.
[13] Yale, Halim AlKarim: Photographic Abstraction and the Lag Effects of Conflict in Iraq.156.
[14] Yale, Halim AlKarim: Photographic Abstraction and the Lag Effects of Conflict in Iraq. 155.