ON HOPE: Halim Al-Karim
Friday Gallery is honored to present our Winter 25 season with Iraqi artist Halim Al-Karim, ON HOPE: Inanna's Revolution. Join us for an opening reception with the artist on Friday February 14th, from 6 to 9pm.
Al-Karim’s work explores the fierce power of mythic beauty across time and culture — a force of sensual and spiritual nourishment that gives birth to hope. This is not gentle softness, but the electric vibrancy of untamed beauty that tears at our flesh, pierces our gaze, and stands in defiance of injustice with proud hands on hips.
Through beauty, we feast on hope.
Halim Al-Karim’s large-scale photography honors the Sumerian mythology of Inanna, who suffered in the depths of darkness, only to return to the fullness of her power with a glint of garnet in her eyes.
Al-Karim is an alchemist as much as a photographer. Merging myth and memory, he blends vintage techniques with experimental practices — from creating a technique that turns mirrors into collodion wet plates, to printing with raw minerals, to building a custom camera with bellows over nine feet tall. His final images become both tangible and opaque, confrontational yet soft, intimately close and veiled far away.
Each Friday season is anchored in a rotating theme, with the art, fashion, and objects curated under a shared spirit. For “ON HOPE,” we pair Al-Karim’s work with brands that explode with the energy of otherworldly beauty and abundance — from the animist sculptures pulsing with life from Lebanese designer Tamara Barrage, to a line of hand-embroidered apparel from artisan Lahore brand Color Coded Crime, to the fiery spirit of parandi designers Ziddi reimagining heritage craft.
For Inanna, to hell and back,
Friday Gallery
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