IN CONVERSATION WITH
There is a particular kind of authority that comes from outlasting every category built to contain you. Samia Halaby has been called an abstract painter, a documentary draftswoman, a political agitator, a computer artist, and- not entirely to her liking- a“ canceled” artist. She has been defined by none.
Matahef spoke with Halaby ahead of Issue 05,“ The Next Generation: Museums, Reimagined by and for the Young,” about abstraction, resilience, artificial intelligence, and what museums owe the young. Her answers are as uncompromising as her paintings.
THE MOST POLITICAL THING I MAKE
Your work carries political significance, from Kafr Qasem to Olives of Palestine, yet you pioneered abstraction, typically seen as apolitical. How do you reconcile the two?
My abstractions may seem apolitical, but they are more political and more international than my documentary and agitational artworks. My documentary drawings depict the 1956 Kafr Qasem Massacre and the destruction of the Palestinian economy through the killing and theft of olive trees. My agitational posters and banners express Palestinian resistance in word and image. To explain why my abstractions are the most political of the three, I look to the history of pictures itself. I find that pictures form a continuously evolving language of forms and colors, from the most primitive cave paintings to their present intricacy. Along the way, countless pictorial modes grew within pictures, then branched off the main line of development to become independently useful— the alphabet, writing, photography, and all lens-based visual technologies. Documentary and agitational images are such branches, clearly defined and distinct. Based on my understanding of history, the three-dimensional illusionist pictorial methods perfected by the Renaissance were taken a major step further in the mid-19th century, with the beginning of the working-class revolution. The Cubists, the Futurists, and the artists of the Soviet revolution added the dimension of time to create four-dimensional abstraction— the first three dimensions being the horizontal, the vertical, and depth. I understand four-dimensional abstraction as the most recent and most advanced illusion of reality yet, born from the revolutionary ethics of the working class, and thus the birth point of working-class culture. With that vast horizon in mind, abstraction becomes far more political than a poster carrier at a demonstration. In short, my documentary work uses a formal language with a deep historical base but adds nothing new: it is threedimensional illusion as defined by the Italian Renaissance, one of the branches that stem from the main line of pictures’ evolution— as are my agitational posters, with their blunt, specific messages about the criminality of occupation, apartheid, the Gaza genocide, and working-class liberation. My abstractions, by contrast, stay within the main line itself. I hope my historical study of that main line can help extend the language of pictures, so that it may give birth to new pictorial modes in the future.
If someone with no knowledge of Palestine stood before one of your paintings, what would you want color and form alone to make them feel first?
Although my abstract paintings are not about Palestine, sometimes I cannot resist giving some of them Palestinian titles to commemorate and honor the heroes I admire, or the social qualities of resistance bred in me. First, I want the viewer to find in my paintings a reflection of their own storehouse of visual experiences. I want something in the painting to take them into that sphere— that vast reservoir of pictorial experience that their eyes constantly, daily, send to their brain. I want the viewer to become aware of their own visual environment and to see it in my paintings. Certainly, their life’ s visual environment is not reflected in cave painting, in tribal pictures, in the art of ancient empires, or even in Renaissance painting. Once the viewer connects with me in that way— a way that bypasses the verbal, a way in which they allow themselves to resist the need to make words out of what they see— they will have opened an avenue between their experiences and mine, and aesthetic communication takes place. It is that moment of recognition that I look forward to: the moment when people first make that connection to their own being. Then I know that a bit of visual language has entered the collective of human visual communication.
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Abstraction becomes far more political than a poster carrier at a demonstration.
TWO TRUTHS ABOUT AMERICA
You built your career within American institutions— the same ones that canceled your retrospective in 2024. How do you hold both truths about America at once?
The two truths about America are that it both holds me and rejects me. I see them as coming from two different classes in American society. Another truth is that one often learns through inverse example. As an outsider to Western civilization, and having arrived in the US at age fourteen, I could more easily than my contemporaries recognize the failures of propaganda, the Eurocentricity, and the sense of entitlement in American culture. I was fortunate to have been brought to America just when the American working class was in motion. Their superior morality, true equality, and collectivism permeated the Midwest. The industrial union movement of the 1940s was just beginning to recede; memories of the great union movements and of the Great Depression and unemployment of the 1930s were fresh in people’ s minds. My university professors had strong leftist leanings and often reminded us of their right to
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