Music Paintings, 2023

Sfeir-Semler is proud to present MOUNIRA AL SOLH’s second solo exhibition in our Hamburg space, including painting, drawing, textile, installation, video, performance, and sound works. 

Music Paintings, 2023
 

Pocket Rhythms draws its title from the artist’s immersion into popular Arabic music from the 70s and 80s. These omnipresent tunes in war-torn Lebanon would fill gaps between news bulletins, as continuous radio sounds rose in the air from shelter to shelter. The habit remained, and as Al Solh paints, she constantly keeps sound playing in the background. The result is a new series of loud, flamboyant paintings that transpose a sense of immediacy and urgency, and that question the intersection of artistic production and political unrest, the contexts in which works are made and performed, and the role music plays in our collective memory. What starts with lyrics from an iconic song, often ends in a mash up of personal moments, sprawled on canvas.