The Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar is showing works by Samia Halaby that were meant to appear in a canceled survey to be held last year at Indiana University.
In December 2023, the school’s Eskenazi Museum of Art called off the Palestinian artist’s show, citing “safety reasons.” The show was scrapped just a month before it was to open at the university’s Eskenazi Museum of Art; Halaby, 87 at the time of the cancellation, had earned a master’s degree at the university and later taught there. Halaby noted at the time that the cancelation came “at a time when Palestinian civilians are being massacred, starved, and displaced by the millions in Gaza.”
In 2024, Michigan State University’s museum ended up staging a part of the exhibition of her work. Halaby also won a special mention for her participation at the Venice Biennale that year.
Mathaf is now staging a presentation of Halaby’s paintings that includes seven of the 35 works that were to appear in the Indiana show. Halaby’s work appears in the first gallery of the just opened exhibition “we refuse_d,” curated by Vasif Kortun. The gallery also includes one work that appeared in the Michigan exhibition.
The nine Halaby works in the Mathaf show, all abstract paintings, span 1980 to 2024. They include the 1989 painting Worldwide Intifadah, which the New York Times reported was “previously unseen” before the planned Indiana show. Also at Mathaf is the 2024 painting Massacre of the Innocents in Gaza. The largest work is the sprawling Transitions (1988–98), which spans an entire wall.
One artwork that would not have been in the Indiana show is the 1999 painting The Red One, which is in the collection of Mathaf.
Kortun said the gallery intentionally used lighting and wall color to mimic the way the show would have appeared in Indiana’s Eskenazi Museum. “It pretends to be what would have been her exhibition there,” he said.” Halaby, who is based in New York, attended the opening of the Mathaf show on Thursday night after participating in a panel discussion “Forms of Resistance: Palestinian art Today” alongside fellow Palestinian artists Taysir Batniji and Dima Srouji at the nearby Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts Qatar . On the panel, Halaby related her abstract paintings to nature and craft, and drew a distinction between them and her political activity. “Some people ask me ‘Where is Palestine in your work?’…I don’t want to make a painting that has good politics so that the gallery will approve it and people will look at it. That’s not politics to me. I make very blunt posters” about the political situation in Palestine.
“we refused” includes works by other artists who had cancelations over the past two years, including Jumana Manna, a Palestinian filmmaker and sculptor whose show at the Heidelberger Kunstverein in Germany was canceled in October 2023.
Halaby’s art has recently seen a surge interest, both within museums and on the market. Her digital artworks are now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.