Halim Al Karim left Iraq after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1988.
During a transitional stay in Amman, Jordan, Al Karim practiced sculpture and painting. He then emigrated to the Netherlands and enrolled in the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam from 1996 to 2000. He studied the technical and aesthetic principles of photographic images and the history of photography in contemporary and modern art. He was quick to integrate the creative potentials into his own personal and artistic projects. Photography has since become the main medium of expression for his aesthetic and existential concerns. To Al Karim photography is not merely an art form purported to reproduce reality faithfully; it is a means to question, analyse, and understand the essence and complexity of the world around him. His work therefore lends itself to decipherment and should be read from the perspective of an existential unveiling, confronting the wounded memory and experience of exile with the desire to lift the mask from a dehumanising reality. Without abandoning his culture, he has incorporated certain perspectives of modernity and thus delivers to us an original, brand new body of work.