Name: MUNCH Award 2025: Celebrating Samia Halaby
Start: 2025-10-24T18:00:00+02:00
Location: MUNCH

MUNCH Award 2025: Celebrating Samia Halaby

Please join us in celebrating Samia Halaby as the recipient of the 2025 MUNCH Award, honouring artistic freedom of expression.
Established in 2024, the MUNCH Award is a recognition of an artist’s long-standing courage and integrity.
The MUNCH Award ceremony will be opened by Lubna Jaffery (Minister of Culture and Equality), and the MUNCH award will be presented by Anita Leirvik North (Vice Mayor for Culture and Business Development). The ceremony includes an artist talk with Samia Halaby and Tominga O'Donnell (Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, MUNCH), and joik by Emil Kárlsen.
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24.10.2025

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Doors: 18:00
Event start: 18:30
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Festsal, MUNCH
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Tickets: https://www.munch.no/en/whats-on/munch-award-20252/
NOTE: The event is free, but seating cannot be guaranteed. We therefore recommend showing up well in advance.
The ceremony will be held in English. Age limit 18 years.
📣 The MUNCH Award jury statement:
Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) is a Palestinian artist, based in New York. The MUNCH Award Jury would like to honour Halaby for her visionary and enduring artistic practice. She was at the forefront of the development of digital art through her experiments with early computer animation, and has been exploring abstraction in its different forms for over 60 years. Her paintings both expand geometric traditions from the Islamic context and introduce contributions from around the world to North-Atlantic regional modernism.
Halaby believes that innovative approaches to painting can reshape how we see and think—not just in terms of aesthetics, but also by opening up new ways of thinking about education, technology, and broader social issues. As an activist, she has been organizing for causes concerning class, race, and Palestine since the 1970s. Halaby has been a vocal critic of censorship in the arts for decades, which she herself has faced, and overcome.
🔗 Read more about the MUNCH Award by following the link: https://www.munch.no/en/munch-award/
Photo: © Daniel Terna