‘Arabic abstraction’ and multiple histories of modernism
While abstraction has remained her artistic practice’s central concern since the beginning of her career, Halaby conceives of abstraction as a means to investigate the structures that organise the material world rather than understanding it as the elimination of subject matter or an autonomous formal language detached from lived experience. Observation of natural phenomena, scientific inquiry, and historical reflection all inform her painting, which seek to make visible relationships between movement, rhythm, colour, and perception.
Halaby’s understanding of abstraction is also informed by her Marxist worldview. Influenced by historical materialism and the revolutionary aspirations of the Russian avant-garde, she conceives of artistic practice as inherently connected to broader historical processes rather than as autonomous aesthetic activity. Halaby has argued throughout her writings that abstraction is inseparable from the material conditions of a society, or from humanity’s collective capacity to understand and transform the world through struggle. Rather than opposing politics and formal experimentation, she considers abstraction itself to be a revolutionary language, capable of expressing movement, change, and the dialectical processes characterising both nature and history.
Nature therefore occupies a central place in this investigation. Halaby studies the processes that govern growth, movement, and transformation: light passing through leaves, the rhythms of flowing water, geological formations, or the dynamics of wind all provide models for pictorial organisation. Her paintings often evoke these phenomena through fragmented brushstrokes, shifting chromatic relationships, and complex spatial structures suggestive of continuous movement across the picture plane. She has frequently drawn parallels between artistic composition and the organisational principles found in nature, arguing that abstraction offers a means of understanding rather than escaping the material world.
Among Halaby’s most significant theoretical contributions, however, is her formulation of ‘Arabic abstraction’, a concept that challenges those conventional histories that locate modern abstraction’s origins exclusively within Western art history. In both her artistic practice and her writings, she argues that the geometric, modular, and rhythmic visual systems developed within Arab and Islamic art constitute sophisticated forms of abstraction that have long been overlooked by the West—an idea that gradually emerged as a consequence of her study of architecture and ornament while traveling in the Middle East. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem proved especially influential in this regard. Beyond its religious and historical significance, after visiting Halaby became fascinated by the visual organisation of its marble revetments, the relationships established between repeating modules and variations, and the interaction between geometry, colour, and architectural space. Similar observations informed her engagement with the Great Mosque of Damascus and other monuments where she identified complex principles of visual organisation that challenge conventional distinctions between ornamentation and abstraction.
For Halaby, the term ‘Arabic abstraction’ does not designate a historical movement, but rather identifies a mode of visual thinking grounded in geometry, rhythm, and observations of nature developed over the centuries in Arab and Islamic artistic traditions. She has argued that the repetitive structures of ornament should be understood not as merely decorative but, rather, as highly sophisticated systems that lead perception and establish relationships between finite forms and infinite space. In this respect, ornament acquires conceptual rather than purely aesthetic significance.
This interpretation constitutes a critique of established narratives of modernism. Halaby questions the assumption that artists working outside the West employ abstraction merely in imitation of Western innovations. She suggests instead that multiple histories of abstraction coexist and intersect: Islamic architecture, Renaissance painting, Russian Constructivism, American abstraction, and contemporary digital media all are part of a larger history of artistic inquiry. Her own paintings embody this position, and consequently Halaby has consistently rejected reductive, essentialist readings of artistic identity. Abstraction for her is a means for diverse artistic traditions to enter into dialogue, allowing cultural inheritance to function as an open and evolving field rather than a fixed marker of identity.
Palestine and documentary practice
Alongside her philosophical investigation of abstraction, political commitment has also informed Halaby’s work throughout her career, taking different forms according to medium and purpose. She has consistently distinguished between her abstract paintings and her documentary projects, emphasising that they respond to different artistic and historical questions. This distinction should not be understood as implying a separation between political and non-political work. Rather, it reflects a tactical approach to artistic practice that allows for artworks to function in different ways according to context and intent.
Her most extensive documentary project, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre (1999–2012), reconstructs the events surrounding the killing of forty-eight Palestinian civilians by Israeli border police on October 29, 1956. Based on archival research and interviews with survivors and victims’ families, the project combines drawing, testimony, and historical documentation to preserve memories that had received limited public recognition. Here, drawing functions primarily as an instrument of historical witnessing, recording experiences that have resisted erasure.
Conversely, Halaby’s abstract paintings pursue political questions through formal means. Works whose titles evoke Palestine, exile, or the Palestinian liberation movements rarely convey their political intent through figurative representation. Instead, movement, colour, and rhythm become vehicles for expressing transformation, resilience, and collective experience. In this respect, abstraction is not conceived as an escape from politics but as a language capable of addressing historical reality without expressing it through representational means.
This position has helped Halaby to distance herself from the expectations often placed upon Palestinian artists to produce recognisable images of national struggle. While acknowledging the importance of documentary representation, she has insisted on the legitimacy of abstraction as a mode of political resistance. Her paintings assert the right of Palestinian artists to participate fully in the history of modern art without relinquishing the specificity of their subjective experience. They also challenge the assumption that a universal artistic language necessarily erases cultural or political difference. Instead, Halaby argues, abstraction itself can become a site where histories of dispossession, resistance, and cultural continuity are reimagined.
Digital art, writing and teaching
From the early 1990s onwards, Halaby extended her exploration of movement to digital media, becoming one of the first artists from the Arab world to experiment systematically with computer-generated abstraction. Working with an Amiga 2000 computer, she developed a software that allowed her to create animated abstract forms capable of evolving in real time. Unlike computer graphics conceived as illustrations or design, these works treat the computer as a painterly instrument capable of generating continuously changing visual relationships. Halaby has described the keyboard as an ‘abstract piano’, allowing her to compose moving images rather than static paintings.
These experiments culminated in performances by the Kinetic Painting Group, founded with composer Kevin Nathaniel and percussionist Hassan Bakr. Combining projected computer-generated animation with live music, these performances investigated the relationship between colour, rhythm, sound, and movement. Halaby regarded digital technology as a way of extending the possibilities already present within abstraction, and had no intention to abandon painting completely. The transition from canvas to animated image reflected her long-standing interest in representing movement as a fundamental principle of visual experience rather than an illusion created within static compositions. In retrospect, these works anticipated later developments in digital and algorithmic art, while remaining closely connected to the formal concerns that had informed her painting since the 1960s.
Alongside her artistic production, Halaby has made substantial contributions as a writer, theorist, and educator. She taught at several American institutions throughout her academic career, holding courses that combined studio practice and a rigorous engagement with the history and theory of art. Her publications have also become important references for scholarship on Palestinian modern art and non-Western histories of abstraction. Among her best-known books are Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Painting and Sculpture in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (2001), one of the first comprehensive surveys of modern Palestinian art, and Growing Shapes: Aesthetic Insights of an Abstract Painter (2016), which brought together essays, notebooks, and reflections on her artistic practice. Across these writings, Halaby argues for an expanded understanding of modernism, one that recognises the contributions of artists working beyond the traditional centres of European and North American art history.
