Small World Cinema Closing Event: Screening and Conversation with Samia Halaby, Kevin Nathaniel, and Brian Kuan Wood

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Join artist Samia Halaby, her longtime musical collaborator Kevin Nathaniel, and Taipei Biennial 2023 co-curator Brian Kuan Wood for an evening of music and conversation in SculptureCenter’s lower level to close Small World Cinema.

Since beginning her career in the late 1950s, Samia Halaby has created a personal vocabulary of abstraction based in painting that spread quickly to experiments with technology. After leaving her teaching position at the Yale School of Art in the 1980s, Halaby began advancing her painterly interest in geometry and the science of visual perception by experimenting with digital technology. She has described how the discovery of the computer as a medium, when she was an artist in her fifties, brought delight in the beauty of programming. She learned software languages and developed short programs that allowed her to create digital paintings that the Amiga 1000 performed on command. Later, during the 1990s, she programmed a PC, creating an application for her own use that converted the keyboard into an “abstract painting piano,” with which she produced kinetic paintings from extensive sets of functions and color palettes. First using the program for small and informal performances with musicians including Nathaniel, Halaby has since become known as a pioneer of computer-based kinetic art.

This event will include a screening of a performance with Julian Abraham “Togar” that Halaby presented as part of the opening program of the Taipei Biennial 2023, followed by a conversation with Kevin Nathaniel and Brian Kuan Wood.

A selection of Halaby’s kinetic painting video works appears in SculptureCenter’s lower level as part of Small World Cinema, a presentation of moving image works from the Taipei Biennial 2023 – Small World, exhibited in New York in collaboration with Taipei Fine Arts Museum.