Artist in Residence, Stockholm 4 September 2024 – 15 November 2024

Mounira is a visual artist who is born and grew up in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil war, and partially in Syria, and currently lives in the Netherlands, and in Lebanon. Her works embrace drawing, painting, video installations, text, collaborative magazines, textile works, collective embroidery, and performative gestures. Her practice bears witness to the continuous impact of conflict in the Arab world and the region, patriarchy, displacement, migration, and the traces they leave on people. Al Solh is fascinated by oral history, and its empowering means; her work is poetical, escapist, colourful and humorous. Humour and collectivity are an exit, a survival method, among others. Al Solh has also a self-reflective approach, and her work is used as a healing method, to cope with today’s reality. Most recently, she began revisiting ancient history, focusing on the Phoenicians and the myth of Europa, to reinterpret these stories from her own perspective. Her aim is to re-appropriate the myths of certain Phoenician princesses, examining how their narratives have been traditionally told by Western male voices and depicted by male painters, including Orientalists. Al Solh playfully re-narrates those myths, from her female, ecological, contemporary and playful perspective. She has recently become interested in Orientalist painters and their influence on artists in Lebanon and the region in general.

Photo: Walid Rachid

Photo: Walid Rachid

During her IASPIS residency she will continue working and expanding on “A Dance with her Myth”, a project she is currently showing at the Lebanese Pavilion in Venice. The work playfully re-appropriates and freely alters the myth of Europa, rewriting it from a female and contemporary point of view, while re-appropriating it from the perspective of the Lebanese shores. In contrast, the myth was originally written by Greek male writers, and its illustrations often portray Europa as a passive victim, seen through the male gaze. Orientalists also painted this myth, among others. The next chapter of the work will be staged in Tunis, a former Phoenician colony, thus opening a new chapter in the narrative.

Al Solh is also developing a new project, in which she will paint people she loves and connect them to trees she associates them with. Like a family tree, this version will have the tree serving as the nourishing fiber, connecting the faces. In times of wars, there is a need to gently appreciate, embrace, and highlight humans who matter, and nature.

Mounira Al Solh studied Painting and Fine Arts at the Lebanese University in Beirut and graduated in 2001. She then studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, in Amsterdam and graduated in 2006. In 2007 and 2008 she was in a research residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

Al Solh is currently representing Lebanon at the Venice Biennale, Arsenale, in the Lebanese Pavilion. She is recipient of the ABN AMRo prize 2023 in Amsterdam. She is currently represented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut and Hamburg, and by Zeno X Gallery in Antwerp.