Karim Ben Khelifa

Karim has been a war correspondent and photojournalist for 20 years working for leading magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Stern, GEO, before moving into new media. From 2015-2017 he was an artist-in-residence at the Imagination, Computation and Expression Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA. From 2013-2015 he was a Fellow at the MIT’s Open Documentary Laboratory. Prior to that he was a Nieman Fellow for Journalism at Harvard University. In 2017 his groundbreaking interactive Virtual Reality exhibition and immersive experience The Enemy premiered at the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris. Through 360-degree imaging and recordings, participants encounter combatants on opposite sides of conflicts in Israel/Palestine, the Congo, and El Salvador. His follow-up project Seven Grams is a global Augmented Reality project that tells the story of our smartphones through the smartphone. By visualising the inner workings of our phones and the role rare earth minerals play in the process Karim highlights the complex political and economic processes inherent in the mineral trade in the DRC and the human cost that went into producing our smartphones.