Mounira Al Solh

The artist spent 24 hours with each of four women—Rogine, Waad, Hanin, and Zeina—in the cities where they now live: Zutphen, Oslo, Washington DC, and Sharjah respectively. All four of them cannot live anymore in their countries of origin, Syria and Lebanon. Together, they share a moment of cooking, rolling on the floors of their new cities, talking about life, nothing and everything, their exile and their continuous aims. This screening presents the chapters featuring Rogine and Waad.

How do you hold on to hope in times of violence and oppression? For visual artist Mounira Al Solh, born in Lebanon and based in the Netherlands, making art is her lifeline: a way to ‘resist the feeling that we are doomed.’ Remarkably, this does not result in somber work. Dancing on the Ruins shows how Al Solh fearlessly builds a multifaceted and playfully activist body of work. Through textiles, ceramics, installations, video and paintings, the artist creates a colorful universe in which she blends personal stories with ancient myths and musical traditions. Her passion is fueled by a deep sense of urgency to offer optimism in a world full of injustice.

"Now Eat My Script is a precipice, a fluid solution in which some spectral noises of the self float adrift. Narration takes the role of a pregnant writer who continuously affirms her hunger and clumsiness towards language and history. Her body is crossed over by both the years to come and the stories that have been buried. As a would-be pirate, she navigates through the tumult of familiar waters."

The artist’s voice is superimposed over those of her interviewees: a group of men who swim daily at the beaches of Beirut. Through this and other editing techniques, Mounira Al Solh’s Paris Without a Sea questions presuppositions about gender, subjectivity, and the interview format itself. In her voiceover, Al Solh affects the accents and manners of her subjects, performing an oral drag that subtly interrogates matters of masculinity, such as the fraternity of Beiruti swimmers or the motley origins of names and nicknames as they relate to fathers and their sons.

The artist spent 24 hours with each of four women—Rogine, Waad, Hanin, and Zeina—in the cities where they now live: Zutphen, Oslo, Washington DC, and Sharjah respectively. All four of them cannot live anymore in their countries of origin, Syria and Lebanon. Together, they share a moment of cooking, rolling on the floors of their new cities, talking about life, nothing and everything, their exile and their continuous aims. This screening presents the chapters featuring Rogine and Waad.

"Now Eat My Script is a precipice, a fluid solution in which some spectral noises of the self float adrift. Narration takes the role of a pregnant writer who continuously affirms her hunger and clumsiness towards language and history. Her body is crossed over by both the years to come and the stories that have been buried. As a would-be pirate, she navigates through the tumult of familiar waters."

The artist’s voice is superimposed over those of her interviewees: a group of men who swim daily at the beaches of Beirut. Through this and other editing techniques, Mounira Al Solh’s Paris Without a Sea questions presuppositions about gender, subjectivity, and the interview format itself. In her voiceover, Al Solh affects the accents and manners of her subjects, performing an oral drag that subtly interrogates matters of masculinity, such as the fraternity of Beiruti swimmers or the motley origins of names and nicknames as they relate to fathers and their sons.