Performing Abstraction: Samia Halaby and the Kinetic Painting Group

Performing Abstraction invited audiences to learn about artist Samia Halaby’s life-long engagement with abstraction and see her perform her kinetic paintings, an experience I consider to be a once in a lifetime opportunity. The programme featured three parts. First, the Kinetic Painting Group performed five numbers in which Halaby created her kinetic paintings live on screen using her trademark code while musicians Kevin Nathaniel Hylton and Hasan Bakr improvised music using traditional and non-traditional instruments from around the world. Second, Val 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.

In the early 1990s, artist Samia Halaby began attending conferences for SCAN (Small Computers in the Arts Network). As Halaby recounted 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 programme 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.

The programme and Halaby’s nearly seven-decade career prompt important questions about how we locate and describe artists within continuously evolving local, regional, national and transnational art histories. Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, in 1936, Halaby has lived in the US since 1951, and in New York since 1976. She had an impressive career as an educator in US universities from 1963 to 1982, including as the first woman to be full-time faculty in the art department at Yale University. Yet Halaby has been largely excluded from art historical narratives – whether American, global or Palestinian – perhaps due to the field’s tendency to overlook Arab diaspora artists and the transnational nature of her practice, with its constellation of influences that exceed national borders and art historical classifications.1

Halaby’s theorisation of abstraction, outlined at the event and originally published in her 1987 article ‘Reflecting Reality in Abstract Picturing’, is key to interpreting her practice. She explains that ‘abstract’ refers to a visual language which ‘reflect[s] reality but at different stages of social development’. She describes ‘picturing’, a term she uses to mean something which ‘refers more directly to reality’ than language, and says that a painting ‘works’ when others can identify the general principles of reality it reflects.2 Halaby elaborated at the event by explaining that when a viewer can identify something in the work, such as leaves growing and decaying, they are drawing on a visual storehouse of information, making her paintings a conduit for viewers to find what is already within them. This shifts abstraction from the product of individual genius to a shared visual language that helps to understand reality and social change.

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. In 1986, she purchased an Amiga, a personal computer by Commodore, and taught herself to code in order to generate kinetic paintings.3 Halaby saw herself as a painter of her time and, as such, wanted to use the technology of her time. Translating abstraction into the digital realm allowed her to add sound to her pictures, and later perform, generating a more rich and nuanced reflection of reality.4 As Electric Dreams demonstrated, Halaby’s endeavour was very unique, and stands apart from the largely Western, masculine histories of new media art.

Each of the five kinetic paintings performed exemplifies Halaby’s definition of abstraction and alludes 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.5 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.6 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 shifting conceptualisation of stillness, while her kinetic paintings illustrate this change through successive scenes.

Next, Halaby explored geometry – context that 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).7 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 activist Elombe Brath’s teachings.8 This inquiry continued 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.9 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 (c. 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’.10 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 drew on her visit to Palestine in 1966 with support from 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 and in Palestine broadly 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. Paying homage to Palestine in kinetic painting, as she also did in her canvas paintings, 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 a kinetic painting performance (and here I emphasise experiencing as a relational, participatory act; not watching, a passive encounter). The rich and rhythmic visual features illustrate the breadth of the Amiga’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 was mesmerising and demonstrates Halaby’s mastery of coding and the Amiga’s potential.

Yet the true rhythm came from the musicians Hylton and Bakr, who not only augmented the visuality of the work with quirky, playful sounds evoking life’s simple joys, but welcomed 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 coalesced into what felt like a ritual or chant that we took part in together, a unifying experience of reality created through abstraction and our shared participation. Collectively, the rhythms of kinetic painting reference not only the musical and 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.

At the conclusion of Performing Abstraction, Halaby, a painter first and foremost, was asked what painting can do. She responded with a story drawn from interviews conducted for her book Liberation Art of Palestine. Halaby recalled speaking with a painter who said he thought painting could change the world. However, after he looked at the Intifada, he realised painting was nothing by comparison. Halaby concluded 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