An Interview with Samia Halaby

Sitting at her laptop in the Music Room, Palestinian artist Samia Halaby created a kinetic painting during her performance with Julian Abraham “Togar,” as part of the Taipei Biennial 2023 opening program. By manipulating the software she had developed herself, Halaby created moving abstractions of color, line, and shape that were projected on a large screen. Sometimes dense and, spare and calm, the images seemed to be in conversation with the electronic soundscapes that Togar improvised alongside Halaby. An abstract painter active for decades, Halaby is a pioneer of digital art, and other examples of her kinetic paintings were on view on monitors throughout the exhibition. Halaby spoke with William Smith, editor for TB2023, about the relationship between her paintings and digital art, her ongoing engagement with Chinese pictorial forms, and how the biennial provided a platform for speaking out about the war in Gaza.

William Smith: You have been committed to abstract art over the decades in your work as a painter. In Taipei, we saw a parallel side of your art, one that is much more collaborative. Your kinetic paintings and live performances employ digital tools and develop with the work of musicians. How do these collaborations relate to your individual practice as a painter?

Samia Halaby: The collaboration is between two media; I’m putting abstract painting in collaboration with music, which is essentially an abstract art form as well. This crossing of disciplines is evident throughout cultural history. Theater mixes acting, words, sound, and music. Mixed media performances put everything together. The complexity of the mixture can be substantial.

There is a tradition of word and picture working together to make things clear. It is most obvious in children's books where the two unite to identify an object with unquestionable clarity. But to have an abstract picture that unfolds in time like music presents a unique opportunity for collaboration. Most moving images are produced with a lens, digital or actual, that guides the way the film describes reality. Abstraction relies on seeing without a lens. Abstract artists and musicians congeal together ideas that result from our walking around and seeing the world and hearing it as well.

My collaborations with sound started with the realization that if I were to be a painter of my time, I should use the technology of my time. As a student of the Bauhaus, I adopted the principle that form must fit the media. In other words, you don't make something out of plaster that has to provide support—you use steel or metal for that function. Computing was the technology of my time and that it could facilitate movement and sound with ease. This brought exciting new attributes to painting. Relativity of light and speed and the memory of the picture's surface came into focus.

I started attending the conferences of the Small Computers in the Arts Network (SCAN) in Philadelphia in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Most of the other attendees were musicians. After the meetings, they would jam on stage, and I realized that I would love to be out there jamming with them. I wrote a kinetic painting program, an art-making instrument that I called the Kinetic Painting Program. I could use it to make still images or jam live with musicians. I describe it as a program that converts the keyboard into an abstract painting piano. I would manipulate the program until I found a beautiful still image and save it. But my main objective was to jam with musicians in the way that I did with Togar in Taipei. I created the medium as a collaborative painting medium for performance.

One of my longest collaborators was Kevin Nathaniel, who was a painting student at Yale University. The year after he graduated, he moved to New York and started making instruments and experimenting with objects that made sound. From there he moved into African percussion. He taught me some of the simple principles that I must adhere to as a performance artist. I thought working with musicians would be a fun artistic collaboration, then suddenly, I found myself performing for an audience -- a new experience hugely different from isolation in a studio. We called ourselves the Kinetic Painting Group and we performed everywhere in New York at far out of the way places to small audiences of committed music lovers. This was taking place during the 1990s and at that time it felt like we were on a different planet entirely from the artworld.

WS: How do you prepare for a performance?

SH: When I collaborate with a musician we agree that we practice and agree on ideas. We do not compose a performance in advance. Our aim is to jam in front of an audience, so the performance won’t ever be the same again. As we prepare, however, we test out different directions. We share ideas and talk about what’s in our work to merge our practices together. But when the actual performance happens, we respond to each other: if the musician is doing something exciting, I get excited and vice versa. Our shared creative practice is expansive because we are reacting to each other.

WS: How do you engage with the digital interface you created?

SH: It’s similar to how electronic musicians take samples from the world and then plays with the available sounds during a performance. I have approximately 12 different palettes, each one containing about 255 colors. Each palette creates a different atmosphere, whether light colors, reddish colors, grays, highly saturated colors and so on.

I use the number keys to select a palette that will establish the color atmosphere. I can change the palette at any time. Each of the function keys has a choice of two continuously moving visual event that I can stop and start. There's one that I call the windshield wiper, which is essentially a line that keeps repeating, going back and forth and erasing anything in its way. While that’s happening, I can continue to add visual elements, only to see these new additions erased as well.  It reminds me of my painting with the ocean at the edge of the water on the beach, as I draw in the sand the water comes and erases while I continue to draw in wet and dry areas collaborating with the ocean.

Each individual key has three conditions activated by pressing it with the cap or home or down keys. Each key press call a routine in the program that within itself cycles through a variety of visual events. For some performances I can dedicate a set of keys to a certain theme. Some of them I’ve named: City, Branching, or Rain. Togar didn’t want to use a set themes and instead aimed to make a continuous performance in Taipei.

WS: One of the most remarkable parts of your performance with Togar was also toward the end, when suddenly you could hear Edward Said's voice speaking about Palestine. That moment built upon expressions of solidarity with Palestine that Reem Shadid, one of the exhibition curators, had made at the opening and that you had made prior to the performance. It struck me that the opening of this biennial was one of the few occasions in the international art world when people could have a conversation about what was really going on in Gaza. I know this continues to be a challenge for many of the artists in the exhibition, and certainly for you with the shocking news about the cancellation of your exhibition at Indiana University. Do you have further reflections on this experience in Taipei and the sense of solidarity with Palestine that was evident at that moment?

SH: The Taipei Biennial seems to have a great deal of respect internationally. I'm very impressed with its reach and significance. I felt a seriousness about presenting art, not a heaviness, but a feeling of being unapologetic about seeking excellence in contemporary art. The show was not about who is mainstream and who is in the pigeonhole of the minorities. Furthermore, there was no attempt to make it entertaining which normally expresses disrespect of the viewer. I do not find the open-hearted sense of internationalism in the US that I found in Taipei.

It was important that Reem felt comfortable enough, in that atmosphere of seriousness, to talk about Gaza in her opening speech. I also felt that. I was not going to perform anywhere without mentioning Gaza: to do so would have been a crime of silence.

WS: One of your paintings is titled Tokyo, Beirut, and you’ve spoken about how it embodies some of the experiences that you feel are shared between both of those cities. How did your experience in Taipei affect your current work?

SH: There are recollections of both Tokyo and Beirut in that painting: the flowery comfort of a sunny seaport as well as the verticality of writing that you find in Japan. In Tokyo all the signs are vertical, creating an impressive and visually effective display. 

Maybe this is not the answer you're seeking, but I came to Taipei wanting to learn more about Chinese painting. I pride myself in trying to learn from international art and not just following the Western path. When I was in Beijing, I went to the Forbidden City, and I found that the walls were empty. The painting that I wanted to see had been brought to Taipei.

I spent two days at the National Palace Museum looking at Chinese paintings. Not at the jewels or anything else. I wanted to learn about the envelope of a work of art. A piece of music begins and ends. A novel is contained between two covers. The writer or musician then creates within these boundaries cognizant of their importance and the unique way they converge with the material between. Visual artists also value this formal attribute. I have studied the picture plane as the container of a picture in many different periods in art but felt that I needed to understand medieval Chinese painting better. Chinese painting expanded my concept of what the picture plane could be. I have not formulated my ideas clearly but white air as mist or cloud or fresh air seemed to play a key role replacing the significance of the perimeter with a concept of expansive space–a space the found expression in clouds and mist and pure air.

When I returned to New York I began making paintings with Gaza was on my mind. My most recent painting, Massacre of the Innocents, Gaza, was influenced by what I learned from Chinese painting I studied in Taipei. No one who sees this painting would say it came from Chinese art, but I was thinking about my experience at the National Palace Museum when I did it. I put it up on my Instagram account before I told people that it was about Gaza. I asked for help in titling it and was struck by how closely people responded with the subject matter I had in mind.

WS: There’s a lot of discussion these days about how artificial intelligence and other new technologies will change art-making and perhaps the very idea of a creative process.  As much as many artists are viewing these technologies as the mediums of our age, they may also be skeptical about what the companies who have created these tools are really after.  As a pioneer of digital technology in art, what potential do you see in AI? 

SH: You might say I am a classicist or fundamentalist; I go back to art history. Some of the innovations underlying new technologies like letters, perspective, the lens, the camera, color division and more were born in the work of picture makers. I'm a painter and I want to continue exploring painting, but I’m using new technology because it's the technology of my time.

This technology can expand the language of painting, one of the basic languages of mankind, allowing us to describe new content. The ability to imitate the principles of nature rather than the appearance of nature, was a new contribution of abstract painting.

I am driven by the notion that I must understand the medium to be able to learn its potential. I came to programming out of the need to utilize the digital medium for what it could contribute to the growth of painting. To do that I chose to learn to program and not allow someone who does not know the history of the arts to stand between me and the material I am studying. Artificial intelligence does not exist. In my understanding it is a heavily knowledge-based programming, skillfully created, and serves many purposes in excellent ways. But it will not show us the way to the future of pictures.