As Sfeir-Semler Gallery marked its 40th anniversary on Thursday in Beirut, hundreds of guests crowded into a small cinema at the back, eager to witness Samia Halaby take the stage for a live performance of her digital kinetic paintings.
The chatter quickly gave way to silence as the Palestinian-American artist welcomed the audience in the gallery's Karantina venue, thanking composer and long-time collaborator Jana Saleh for providing the music. What followed was a mesmerising experience: colourful shapes and patterns appeared, multiplied and overlaid one another in expanding layers, set to the droning tones of a synthesiser.
“I never think of the viewer, other than as people who are my equals and who have seen the world and live in the same world as I do,” Halaby tells The National. “I am looking at the world – not at the viewer – and I am trying to interpret the world, trusting that they've seen it already and will understand.”
The occasion also saw the opening of Abstract in Motion, a solo exhibition at Sfeir-Semler’s Downtown location, which brings together Halaby’s canvases and computerised kinetic works in tribute to a career spanning more than six decades.
“The celebration of the gallery’s 40th anniversary offers a special opportunity to highlight Samia Halaby’s work,” curator Jean-Marc Prevost says. “Their forms, sounds, colours and rhythms reflect the present moment, social realities and technological revolutions that have transformed our relationship to space, forcing us to reposition ourselves in radically different ways.”
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby is regarded as a pioneer of abstraction and computer-created art. Forced to flee Yafa with her family at the age of 11 following the Nakba in 1948, she later settled in the US. In 1963, she earned a master's in fine arts in painting from Indiana University and embarked on an academic career, becoming the first female associate professor at Yale School of Art.
Her early creative pursuits left her unsatisfied, prompting her to “erase” her teachers and seek a new artistic direction.
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“Up until 1979 or so, I was trying to understand how we see the world as if we are stationary, looking at it through an inherited, empirical lens,” she says. “Around 1980, I took a jump. I said: 'No, this is backward; it's time to see the world while we're moving.' All of the pictures in the show reflect that newer attitude.”
Halaby’s lifelong interest in mathematics drew her to computers in the 1960s. At Indiana University, she became intrigued by her classmates’ works with early machines programmed using punch cards.
“I found their discussion interesting, but – to have a relationship with a mainframe computer – you had to have a relationship with a programmer, and preferably a department at a university or a big corporation,” she recalls. “There was always someone between you and the machine.
“I know from art history that the best artists used the technology of their time,” she adds. “When the first personal computer came out, I took it.”
In 1986, she began experimenting with computer-generated visuals, leading to the creation of her Kinetic Painting Programme, which turned her Amiga computer into a digital painting instrument. She continues to perform with it today.
“It's an app that I wrote on what now are called legacy machines,” Halaby continues. “I wrote it because I saw the electronic musicians jamming after the Symposium on Small Computers in the Arts Network, SCAN, in Philadelphia. At night, after the meetings were over, they would be jamming, and I sat – the only one in the audience – listening and thinking that I would love to be up there jamming with them. So, I wrote the program to do that.
“The reason I'm still using that technology is laziness. I don't have time to learn all that I need to learn. I'm 88. Everybody wants my paintings, and I have writings that I want to finish. I might do it anyway, if I can,” she explains.
Through computers, Halaby embraces mutable, transformative images infused with time and motion. She borrows the term kinetic from Alexander Calder’s sculptures to describe this dynamic visual language.
“Pictures don’t start with words. Pictures have a language all of their own, and that language is very important,” she says. “It's not about techniques and materials. It's not about content. It's about a language that makes it possible to speak about the time you're in.
“I adopted that term for my paintings because the word ‘moving’ has a pedestrian meaning about emotions, which I disagree with,” she adds. “It has persuaded everyone that we artists are just acting out of feeling, and that it is feeling that guides the artwork, which is – to me – a lot of nonsense.
“The most important envelope of any work of art – be it a novel, a poem or a painting – is the container that separates it from reality,” she continues. “In a painting, it's the picture plane and the picture surface. In a kinetic painting, the surface is a memory; there's time lapse and colours that change in a shape, shapes that have sound, and sounds that do not have shape and so on. There is relativity of space, but there is also relativity of motion. It's richer.”
Halaby also sees her work through a political lens. “I think abstraction is the future of pictures, but I also see it from a political point of view,” she says. “This past century has seen a global class war going on. The revolutionary highs in mankind's recent history are the only times that have brought us any refreshing new ideas in art. The rest – to me – is of no interest.”
Today, computer art has expanded dramatically, with generative artificial intelligence dominating discourse. Yet Halaby remains sceptical of its creative potential without a human perspective. While computers may be able to master the facts, humanity remains the arbiter of truth.
“AI is not intelligent,” Halaby says. “It's amazing for some things. It's useful, but it's not intelligent. I can accept that there will be someone who will be able to use all of that in their own creative way, but I'm still of that old school where I feel I really need to know my material before I can exploit it properly. Otherwise, you're allowing another human being to tell you what you can and cannot do.
“You have to be truthful if you want people to react to your work. I trust people have seen the world I've seen. They are not idiots. We share a lot, and this is our world, so I trust they have seen it intelligently.”
And even as she continues to experiment with digital tools, she remains grounded in her own philosophy. “Think of me as a father or mother who is preparing food for their children. They don't do it out of feeling. They know they had better choose good food, without poisons or rot; they're preparing healthy food. I am preparing healthy food for you. When you eat it, you might feel good, but that's up to you, not me. I just make sure it's good.”
Abstract in Motion runs at Sfeir-Semler Gallery Downtown in Beirut until November 3
