Palestinian artist Samia Halaby’s works to be exhibited at Sharjah Art Museum

Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Sharjah Art Museum is all set to host the exhibition Lasting Impressions: Samia Halaby (Sept. 20 – Jan 7, 2024). Halaby is a Palestinian artist born in Jerusalem in 1936, currently living in New York.

This is a major retrospective of her work and will include 180 works of various sizes and media, representing her career through abstract paintings, sculptures, digital works, documentary drawings and more. Profoundly persuaded that future innovation in pictures lies in abstraction, she has remained dedicated to its potential for over six decades.

The abstraction she presents has its basis in reality, since it is an imitation of reality rather than of seeming reality. She employs visual abstraction to transform what the senses have stored in memory over a long period of time — “what the viewer and I already know” — into abstract visual form. Through such abstract creations, she represents the inherent visual experience that resides within all of us – abstract shape, colour, light and movement combine into art where the viewer recognises his own experience. The artist does so by deploying the knowledge regarding methods and technologies she studied, ranging from techniques of using paint, to using digital media.

Her individual approach to abstract painting has won for her an impressive reputation, solidifying her standing as a forward-thinking artist. Through her unique artistic style, extensive spectrum of methods and prolific artistry, she has perhaps stretched the notion of abstraction with clarity and precision.  The artist’s interpretation of the exhibition’s title — Lasting Impressions — is that it explores the wonderful reaction her work elicits in contemporary youth — especially Arab youth — whom she admires. She takes note of their talents and high commitments to the future. Discerning viewers may perceive her abstraction exactly as she envisions, recognising in it a reflection of their own pre-existing experience. Her painting “mirrors our shared perception of the world we live in”, as she puts it.

  Samia Halaby is a Palestinian artist born in Jerusalem.

As a Palestinian artist who was born in the city of Jerusalem, she experiences the agony of exile and displacement from her homeland since 1948. The painful memory of exile enters her paintings not as subject matter, but often as titles to places in Palestine she loves. She will not mix political history with her exploration of abstraction - but she does state that being loyal to abstraction is itself a political act/art. Palestine as experience is clearly the driving force that allowed her to exert great effort to create the documentary series memorialising the Kafr Qasem Massacre.

Though she works primarily in abstraction, here  she has also utilised a documentary-style of figurative drawing. The Kafr Qasem series, which is a more politically oriented work, recalls the happenings of late 1950s. About 25 minutes before 5 p.m. on October 29, 1956, an Israeli “Border Patrol” announced a 5 p.m. curfew in the village of Kafr Qasem, which is inside the Israeli borders. The announcement came at a time when many workers were not in the village and had no communication with people there. Then, before 5 p.m., the “Border Patrol” started killing. “In less than three hours … Israeli soldiers killed 49 people in … Kafr Qasem. They were mostly workers and children returning home in the evening,” Halaby writes.

She is recognised as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world and began her career in the early 1960s, shortly after graduating from Indiana University, with a MFA in Painting. While teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1964, she travelled to the Eastern Mediterranean and studied the geometric abstraction of the region’s Islamic architecture; this has been continuously been factored into her work. It was also during this time she began investigating the materialist principles of abstraction: how reality can be represented through form.

During her final student days and for a period after, Halaby’s approach to painting was characterised by flat colour, inspired by the Minimalists and by work of Josef Albers and his book Interaction of Color. The work depended essentially on the rectangular surfaces of human life, be they walls, windows, writing paper, floors, cards, or gently hung weavings. A number of her paintings have been created by building upon the methods of Russian Constructivists and traditional Arabic arts and Islamic architecture. The visual culture of Palestine and its setting have also figured in her paintings, as has the dynamism of New York City. She has designed dozens of political posters and banners for various anti-war causes.

In the 1980s, Halaby experimented with computer-generated painting, known as kinetic art. As of 2020, her oeuvre contained over 3,000 works, including paintings, digital media, three-dimensional hanging sculptures, artist books, drawings, and limited edition prints. She is an internationally recognised artist and alongside her artistic pursuits, a dedicated advocate for Palestinian rights. Remarkably, in spite of her extensive oeuvre and serious work, events also often provoke her sense of humour and playfulness! Her paintings are held in several museum collections, including the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, The British Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Detroit Institute of Art. The current exhibition is part of the Lasting Impressions series, held annually at the Sharjah Art Museum. The aim is to focus on prominent Arab artists who have had prolific careers and have left a lasting impression on the development and evolution of modern art in the Arab world.