MoMA - Hyundai Card First Look: Samia Halaby
Tue, Jun 03
|MoMA
Pixels in motion, abstraction redefined. MoMA spotlights Samia Halaby’s early digital “kinetic paintings”—where art meets code.
Time & Location
Jun 03, 2025, 7:00 AM – Sep 30, 2025, 10:50 PM
MoMA, 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA
About the event
Through Fall 2025
MoMA – Hyundai Card First Look Series
Visit MoMA.org
Artist Samia Halaby has spent a lifetime expanding the possibilities of abstraction. Rooted in the visual traditions of Islamic architecture and Russian Constructivism, her work evolved in a radical direction in the 1980s—by embracing the computer as a canvas.
As part of MoMA’s Hyundai Card First Look series, this exhibition presents five kinetic paintings Halaby created with the Commodore Amiga 1000, a groundbreaking home computer she began experimenting with in 1986. Teaching herself the programming languages BASIC and C, Halaby transformed her practice into a dialogue with the machine—coding vibrant shapes and motion into mesmerizing loops of digital abstraction.
These early digital works move, contract, and rotate across the screen with accompanying retro sound effects, blurring the line between painting and performance. They stand as visionary, ahead-of-their-time meditations on movement, perception, and the digital age’s aesthetic possibilities.