Performing Abstraction: Samia Halaby and the Kinetic Painting Group

In the early 1990s, artist Samia Halaby began attending conferences for SCAN, or Small Computers in the Arts Network. As Halaby told the story during Performing Abstraction, when the day’s conference programme ended, she watched participants gather to jam. Elsewhere, she recalled seeing her former students performing. Halaby became intrigued and eager to engage with artists, musicians, and performers. The medium for this collaboration was her new kinetic paintings that she first developed in 1986, an imaginative artistic endeavour that employed the computer as a medium to make art. Halaby toyed with her computer program first on her own, then successfully recruited her former students, the now world-renowned musicians Kevin Nathaniel Hylton and Hasan Bakr, as her collaborators; together, they formed the Kinetic Painting Group. Halaby has now been performing her kinetic paintings with the Kinetic Painting Group and guest collaborators globally for nearly four decades, a legacy that now includes the Tate Modern.

Performing Abstraction invited audiences to learn about Halaby’s life-long engagement with abstraction and see her perform her kinetic paintings, an experience I see as a once in a lifetime opportunity. The program featured three parts. First, the Kinetic Painting Group performed five numbers in which Halaby creates her kinetic paintings live on screen using her trademark code while Hylton and Bakr improvise music using traditional and non-traditional instruments from around the world. Second, Valentina Ravaglia, curator of Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, joined Halaby in conversation about her career and the development of abstraction. Finally, Bakr and Hylton joined the two for a brief Q&A.

The programme and Halaby’s nearly seven-decade career prompt important questions about how we locate and describe artists within local, regional, national and transnational art histories that are continuously evolving. Since her earliest days as an artist, Halaby has been invested in abstraction and is an internationally acclaimed painter. Her paintings range from monochromatic to multicolour, miniature to monumental, 2D to 3D and everything in between, amounting to thousands of paintings on different surfaces that address subjects ranging from cities to nature, metals, animals and more through abstraction. Halaby’s source materials and artistic interlocutors are transnational in scope, always in dialogue with each other. Yet it has only been within the last two decades that Halaby’s work has become more widely known, a shift that runs parallel to the global turn in art history.

Many of our extant models for art historiography, however, are too narrow in scope to acknowledge the complexities of Halaby’s biography and practice. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1936, Halaby has lived in the US since 1951, and in New York since 1976. She earned a BA from the University of Cincinnati in 1959, an MA in Art from Michigan State University in 1960, and an MFA in Painting from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1963. Halaby had an impressive career as an educator in American universities from 1963, including as the first woman to be full-time faculty in the art department at Yale University. Halaby, however, is not featured in American art histories, an omission one could attribute to the field’s tendency to exclude Arab diaspora artists. Halaby exhibited in the 3rd Havana Biennial in 1989, a pivotal event in art world’s global turn along with shows like Magiciens de la Terra (Paris, Centre Pompidou, 1989) and The Other Story curated by Rasheed Araeen (London, Hayward Gallery, 1989–90). Yet global art histories tend to overlook Arab artists, including Halaby. While Halaby is included in survey books of art from the “Middle East” or the “Arab World,” she is not incorporated in many Palestinian art histories, perhaps because she lives in the US. Halaby’s abstractions are also quite different from her contemporaries in American painting, abstraction in the Arab world, and Palestine. Halaby’s work exemplifies the imperative for a transnational art history that emphasizes the constellation of influences shaping her work, which exceeds national borders and art historical classifications.1

Halaby’s theorisation of abstraction is key to interpreting her practice, including her performance at the Tate Modern, but also provides case studies for transnational modernisms. Halaby outlined the broad contours of her thinking at the event, which was originally published in her 1987 article Reflecting Reality in Abstract Picturing. The article has several interrelated arguments. First, Halaby explains that “abstract” refers to a specific visual language which 'reflect[s] reality but at different stages of social development.' Second, she describes picturing, a term she uses for her own work, as something which 'refers more directly to reality' than language, a comparison that also positions her paintings, or pictures, as reflective of reality. Third, a painting “works” when others can identify the general principles of reality it reflects.2 Halaby elaborated on the third point at the event by explaining when a viewer can identify something in the work, such as leaves growing and decaying, they are drawing on a visual storehouse of information, which makes Halaby’s paintings a conduit for viewers to find what is already within them. Halaby shifts abstraction from the product of individual genius to a shared visual language that helps to understand reality and social change, a theory which exceeds all art historical and national boundaries.

The transnational underpinning of Halaby’s abstraction is further reinforced by her artistic interlocutors, which she often pays homage to in her work. One Yard After the Shingle Factory (1982) recognizes Marcel Duchamp and critics’ dismissal of his work, a modernist who shared Halaby’s interest in motion.3 Song for Albers (2015) acknowledges Josef Albers by reinterpreting his famous series Homage to the Square. Albers, like Halaby, was invested in the relationship between colours and perception. Halaby also cites the Constructivists, whose work considered time and relativity, and the Futurists, who explored simultaneity, though she found their work too illustrative. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Halaby’s extensive research into monuments in the Arab world, especially Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, led her to realize that the roots of abstraction were in the Arab world, an argument that upends the Western-centric dialogue around modernism, and an epiphany that implied a need for transnationalism before the term was in vogue.

Although Halaby’s theory of abstraction is largely rooted in painting on canvas, her kinetic paintings are a direct extension of her investment in understanding how abstraction can reflect reality. And more recently, scholars and museums have returned to Halaby’s digital work to attend to the groundbreaking nature of her kinetic paintings. Halaby first had the idea to do something with the computer when she was teaching at Indiana University, Bloomington, from 1969–72, but she did not pursue this curiosity because she moved to Yale.4 In 1986, she purchased an Amiga, a personal computer by Commodore, and taught herself to code in order to generate kinetic paintings.5 Halaby saw herself as a painter of her time and, as such, wanted to use the technology of her time to expand the possibilities for painting. Translating abstraction into the digital realm importantly allowed her to add sound to her pictures and later perform, both of which generated a more rich and nuanced reflection of reality.6 As Electric Dreams demonstrated, Halaby’s endeavour was very unique, and stands apart from the (largely Western, masculine) histories of new media art (which she is also excluded from).

Each of the five kinetic paintings performed exemplify Halaby’s definition of abstraction and allude to different aspects of Halaby’s transnational thinking, an interpretation augmented by seeing her kinetic paintings in dialogue with her canvas paintings. Nature is a constant touchstone in Halaby’s theorisation, and informed the evening’s opening number: Branching (1995). Halaby’s earliest attempts to create an abstract painting, like Lilac Bushes (1960), reflected nature. At Yale, Halaby wandered around gathering leaves, leading her to the epiphany that her paintings must capture the same process of growth and decay as a leaf.7 Similarly, Branching was inspired by Halaby’s 'absorption with how trees and autumn leaves grow,' and the kinetic painting captures this process through short lines, irregular marks, and vivid colours.8 Observing nature’s transformation helped Halaby to think about how abstraction could capture the experience of seeing the world in motion, compressing a series of ephemeral moments into a singular two-dimensional image; her canvases evoke this change in stillness, while her kinetic paintings illustrate this change in successive scenes.

Next, Halaby explored geometry, as Ravaglia and Halaby outlined in conversation; this context is important to the Kinetic Painting Group’s second number: Brass Women (1989). Referring to her painting Kansas City Studio (1966), Halaby explained that her efforts to be an abstract painter were impacted by the revelatory experience of seeing a Petrus Christus painting at the Nelson Rockhill Gallery when she was teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute (1964–67).9 The painting sparked her epiphany that “realism” was also a form of abstraction, prompting her to rethink sight and perception. Halaby proceeded to build models that she carefully placed and then painted still lifes composed of geometric shapes. These geometries were sometimes made into conduits for sociopolitical statements, as seen in Black is Beautiful (1969), which was dedicated to those fighting in the Civil Rights Movement and the Black liberation movement, as well as in recognition of Elombe Brath’s teachings.10 This inquiry continues in Brass Women, a kinetic painting composed of numerous geometric and biomorphic shapes and patterns that obliquely reference the female form. Halaby originally dedicated Brass Women to Black and Latinx women activists, but at the performance, she also dedicated it to the youth fighting for liberation today.11 Brass Women illustrates how abstraction can reflect different aspects of reality, and how the visual language is malleable in relation to the realities we experience.

In City (ca. 1995), the third work the Kinetic Painting Group performed, two places that are important to Halaby’s visual thinking converge: New York and Palestine. As the title points to, Halaby was inspired by her 'fascination with the function of a city.'12 Notably, Halaby says a city, implying the general principles of different cities. In 1976, Halaby moved to New York, and subsequently, her Tribeca neighbourhood and New York’s landscape became common subjects in her work, including paintings like Tribeca (1982), Pink Walking Green (1983), and Neighborhoods (1987). These paintings capture the multisensorial, fleeting experience of New York in a canvas. At the same time, Halaby also pursued a series titled Dome of the Rock, which reflected on her visit to Palestine in 1966 with a Faculty Research Grant from the Kansas City Art Institute that allowed her to study architecture and ornament in the Arab world. The language of abstraction she observed on the Dome of the Rock in Palestine informed her paintings, including those of New York, as seen in Broadway Below Chambers (1982). The kinetic painting City then points to the similarities between cities like New York and Jerusalem and how they operate, as well as how the experience of navigating such prismatic and dynamic environments, abstracted through lines that appear like rays and a constant flow of unique visual information, is also similar.

Halaby’s research into the architecture and ornament of Palestine is referenced more directly in works like Yafa (1993)—the penultimate number. Named after the Palestinian port city where Halaby lived as a young girl, Yafa references the architecture of Palestine through geometric shapes and diagonal sections that appear, disappear and overlay, much like the mosaics on a building’s exterior. To pay homage to Palestine in kinetic painting, as she did in her canvas paintings as well, provides further visual evidence of how abstraction’s roots are in the Arab world, and how these foundations are important to contemporary artistic practice, and implicitly, transnational art histories. Later, the Kinetic Painting Group also toured Syria, Jordan and Palestine, taking abstraction and modernism back to the Arab world to celebrate its origins.

Finally, Performing Abstraction concluded with Rhythms (1992), a work that exemplifies not only the intricate layering of Halaby’s kinetic paintings, but also the importance of experiencing (and here I emphasize experiencing as a relational, participatory act, not watching, a passive encounter) a kinetic painting performance. The rich and rhythmic visual features illustrate the breadth of the programme’s possibilities with overlapping shapes, colours and patterns, each more intricately executed than the last as the components come and go in a rhythmic fashion. The variety is mesmerizing and demonstrates Halaby’s mastery of coding.

Yet the true rhythm is from the musicians Hylton and Bakr, who not only augment the visuality of the work with quirky, playful sounds evoking life’s simple joys, but welcome the audience to clap along—a group of people from around the world who came together on a chilly, London evening. The audience’s clapping in time with the strong, rhythmic drumbeat coalesces into what feels like a ritual or chant that we take part in together, a unifying experience of reality created through abstraction and our shared participation. Collectively, the rhythms the kinetic painting is titled after reference not only the music and the visual features, but life itself, a reality shaped by general principles shared transnationally. To experience the Kinetic Painting Group is to discover how the kinetic paintings were meant to be seen, a live encounter with the ways abstraction represents reality and brings people together through shared experiences found in abstraction.

A painter first and foremost, Halaby was asked what painting can do at the conclusion of Performing Abstraction. She responded with a story drawn from interviews conducted for her book Liberation Art of Palestine. Halaby recalls speaking with a painter who said he thought painting could change the world. However, after he looked at the intifada, he realized painting was nothing by comparison. Halaby concludes from this experience that her singular painting may not change the world, but when people gather together and unionise, change will come. The Kinetic Painting Group’s performance is deeply intertwined with this, gathering together in rhythm, in reality, in abstraction—a visual language ripe for social change.

The tide is turning, slowly but surely, not just in the development of transnational art histories, but in articulating a contemporary vision for a new world order defined by liberation. It is the rhythms of daily life and the sounds of community coming together around a cause, a work of art, a hope, that can spark a revolution—and 'that’s what electric dreams are made of.'

This event was organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor