Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Lara Atallah

NW Earlier this year, you performed a form of digital kinetic painting live at Nottingham Contemporary, accompanied by improvisational music by Guohan Zeng. How did the performance work?

SH The performance at Nottingham involved a programme I wrote in the 1990s which converts a keyboard into something like a piano that plays images instead of sounds. There are many variations on each key. Some keys choose colour atmospheres, and some choose moving or growing images that expand and contract. I type ideas out as we practice and discuss the theme. There’s a theme, “Brass Women”, titled in honour of African and Latina women activists in the US, and in Nottingham, I added a dedication to the Palestine Action Group and the young women there fighting against weapons manufacturers, as well as to the working-class women of Nottingham. Nottingham is very well known for its working-class history, which I admire. The work is a combination of painting and a new technology, which allows us to use motion differentials, speed, time and change. In this case, I’m not adding the sounds myself but allowing the musicians to collaborate. We’re essentially jamming. In my Arab background, there are traditions of jamming related to impromptu poetry and sound. 

NW What relationship exists between the music and the art-making?

SH With the musicians I’ve worked with for a long time, there is a greater response and ability to make each piece sound different. I was able to communicate that to the musicians who collaborated with me in Nottingham, and they were sensitive to it. My reactions are limited because the musicians I work with use analogue instruments, and it’s easier for them to be versatile and change in the moment. It’s harder using electronics as you prepare a great deal in advance, even though you put the parts together quickly. One of the things I am especially sensitive to is the rhythm they create. Sometimes, it carries me away, and I start banging the keys a little too fast and sometimes the musicians also get excited in response to what they’re seeing.

NW You started with large, abstract paintings. What did the introduction of technology represent for you, and what did it allow you to do?

SH I’m an abstract painter by total persuasion, from the beginning. This doesn’t mean I don’t do other crafts – I create documentary and political art – but the most important thing is abstract painting. Technology has confirmed that abstraction is the most innovative direction for the future of pictures. It doesn’t mean that all pictures have to be abstract; it means that abstraction contributes new ideas. If someone still wants to make a beautiful impressionist landscape, there’s nothing wrong with that. Such pictures have contributed over the centuries by helping to create perspective and shading, and therefore, the camera and the lens. What abstraction will give to production and human culture is not clear yet – we’ll know more in the future.

NW Your whole career seems to be asking that question of abstraction. Are we still yet to discover what it essentially means?

SH Abstraction uses principles in nature and interprets what we see with our eyes as we move. It also accepts motion, and visual motion has not yet been explored sufficiently. Taking a camera and putting it in front of your eyes is not the way the human brain comprehends space. If I sit at the fire escape outside my window, although my street is fairly dull and quiet for New York City, I still hear the hum. Some people pass by whispering. I see their iPhones flashing. It’s an experience that can go on for a minute or an hour; it’s compelling. You feel like you’re part of something living. But if I took hundreds of photographs of my street during that hour, it would not tell me the same story. Even if I had a film crew filming everything happening on the street, I would not have that same experience. There’s something about how our brain processes what we see over time that has not yet been explored sufficiently. Who knows what our scientists will be able to extract or what inventions are yet to come. I am optimistic about the future of abstraction and the human race, if we don’t allow it to self-destruct.

NW It can be hard to feel optimistic at the moment. I’m interested in your book, Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre, which documented via figurative drawing the victims of the 1956 massacre of Palestinians by the Israeli Border Police. Could you tell me a bit about that book and the relevance of the documentarian approach to this moment?

SH I remove the word “fine” from art, because everything is fine. Cooking is fine, and taking care of babies is fine. Let’s get rid of the word fine. It’s silly and elitist. What you do is just as fine as what anybody else does, especially if you do it with love and optimism and commitment to your craft. We’re left with art. Art literally means craft, ability, skill and time. It takes skill to cook, and you cook with a scientific approach because otherwise, you would poison those who eat the food. I also made this coat that I’m wearing.  I’m an artist and and I made it, so that’s how they relate to each other. My abstractions intend to explore; my drawings of the Kafr Qasem Massacre intend to document. In Arab and Palestinian culture, when we cook hummus, we put it on a plate, and then it’s fun to take red pepper and put it around the corners, and dice some cucumber, and decorate it, and then put oil in a circle over it, and render it as a visual presentation. We all do visual things for different reasons; we dress and fix our hair but with different intentions. They’re all crafts. But we document in order to tell the story to our children, to Palestinians and other people. In recent years, a bigger responsibility has fallen on us because being stubborn is our national trait, and our stubbornness has made us a magnetic centre for solidarity movements all over the world. It is a beautiful thing to see. As far as I’m concerned, we should abandon nationalism and unify for a future that is going to feed the children and not kill them, educate them and not starve them, take care of their health and not impose disease on them. Palestinian culture is rich and special and has traditions of poetry, painting and art. The arts, however, are unable to do much more than document, teach, and inspire optimism. Power and organisational methods are still needed to affect change. Eventually, we have to take matters into our own hands. .