Samia Halaby: Kinetic Painting

A conversation between artist Samia Halaby and Sanna Almajedi, recorded live following a performance at e-flux on September 10, 2024. 

In the performance, Halaby used a computer program that she coded in the early ’90s to generate abstract shapes. These were manipulated in real-time alongside sonic improvisation by musician Amir ElSaffar. 

Samia Halaby is a trailblazer in contemporary abstract art internationally. In her distinctive painting style, Halaby draws inspiration from nature and historical movements such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde. Displaced from Palestine in 1948 with her family when she was eleven, Halaby was educated in the American Midwest at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were marginalized. Halaby believes that new approaches to painting can transform our ways of seeing and thinking, not only within aesthetics, but also as a way to discover new perspectives for advances in teaching, technology, and society at large. This conviction has inspired her to pursue additional experiments in drawing, printmaking, computer-based kinetic art, and free-from-the-stretcher painting. Halaby’s work is collected by many museums such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe; and Birzeit University (Ramallah).