CURATED: SAMIA HALABY

Samia Halaby (b. 1936 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian-American artist, activist, and scholar living and working in New York. 

Halaby is a painter who was educated in the 1950s in the American Midwest, at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were often overlooked. In the 1960s, she started working with intense colors and shapes to construct minimal patterns that repeated and spread over the surface of the canvas. Early on in her practice, her paintings left the rectangular stretched fabric to become shaped canvases, three-dimensional mobiles, or computer-generated visuals. She constantly foregrounded works and techniques and, in retrospect, was at the avant-garde of artistic production throughout her career.

Photo: Lara Atallah, Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg

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The Amiga kinetic paintings are programs that Samia Halaby coded between 1986 and 1989 using the programming languages Basic and C on a Commodore Amiga 1000. 
In DARK WEAVER, a set of rectangular bars repeat by moving back and forth incrementally, each defining a specific area. Areas already defined by a moving bar are invaded by the motion of other bars. As vertical and horizontal bars intersect, diagonal boundaries are created between them. Differently incremented bars overlap, leaving a remnant of what they covered in the negative spaces between. 
This was a period when Halaby had begun programming in the C language and was creating functions that she called Yoyos. These functions received three values and produced the result: a number that increased until it reached the upper limit, decreased until it reached the lowest limit, and was incremented by the requested quantity. Yoyo functions are thus culled repeatedly to determine the location and incrementation of each bar. This is how they are made to go back and forth or up and down. Several sets of bars are called simultaneously, and as they move back and forth, they intersect.

DARK WEAVER

The exhibition presents pioneers from different generations, early 1950s until today, working in the field of generative art. On view will be, among others, plotter drawings, generative photography, sculptures, and NFTs from 30 international artists. In collaboration with ELEMENTUM.ART.

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SAMIA HALABY

ART

EXHIBITION