Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, September 10 at 7 pm for a live performance by visual and sound artist Samia Halaby, accompanied by musician Amir ElSaffar. The performance will be followed by a Q&A with Halaby and the curator, Sanna Almajedi.

Halaby has long believed that to be an artist of her time, she had to explore the latest technology. In the early 1980s, this belief led her to explore computing. The computer marketed to artists at the time was the Commodore Amiga—the only computer that had a wide color palette, when Microsoft and Apple were still operating more or less in black and white. Already in her 50s, Halaby began learning how to program using the language Basic, and by 1987, she advanced to the computing language C. While Halaby is known for her abstract oil paintings, she sees programming as a way to visualize her paintings in motion. In her latest monograph Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy (2024), she writes that “[i]n kinetic abstraction, a shape could have shifting color and size; it could not in oil painting… in kinetic painting, a shape could make noise.” She goes on to say that “[e]ven though this work on the Amiga might look primitive in relation to paint on canvas or even in absolute terms, it is built on aesthetic ideas that expand the language of static abstraction made with pigments on canvas. It is the beginning of a visual discipline…”

On September 10 at e-flux, Halaby will be performing using a program that she coded in the early ’90s. This program generates abstract shapes that she manipulates in real-time using the keyboard, allowing her to perform alongside musician Amir ElSaffar who will be improvising electronic music on modular synthesizers. This event marks the duo’s first performance together, but not their first collaboration, as Halaby’s work graces the cover of ElSaffar’s 2015 album Crisis.

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