At the beginning of 2023, the eleventh ABN AMRO Art Award was granted to Mounria Al Solh. As part of the award, she created Nami Nami Noooom, Yalla Tnaaam, an exhibition and eponymous installation in which she returns to her childhood in a civil war-ravaged Lebanon.
Al Solh (Lebanon, 1978) is a storyteller who links her personal history as a Lebanese woman and immigrant with current themes such as identity, politics, and feminism. In doing so, she employs a range of materials. She embroiders and paints, uses language and music, and creates magazines, installations, and performances. Moreover, working collaboratively with others plays an important role in her work alongside her individual studio practice.
Al Solh is a talented artist whose oeuvre can be considered both personal and political, and seductive as well as activist. The jury has great appreciation for the way in which Al Solh, residing alternately in Lebanon and the Netherlands, uses these vantage points to combine cultures and experiences while actively engaging her shifting environment through collaboration.
— from the jury report
Lebanese civil war
In Nami Nami Noooom, Yalla Tnaaam, Al Solh returns to her childhood in a civil war-ravaged Lebanon. In the evening, if bombardments were going on, her mother would allow her to cut holes into her pyjamas and then carefully sew them back up with a needle and thread. It calmed her when explosions kept her from falling asleep. For this exhibition, she repeated that meditative, healing activity alongside a group of women with both local and migratory backgrounds in the Netherlands and Lebanon. She incorporated the pyjamas into a new installation that can be seen for the first time in H'ART Museum. For the paintings and drawings on paper and cloth shown in the exhibition, Al Solh drew inspiration from dreams and nightmares. With the title of the exhibition, she refers to two Arabic lullabies from her youth that her mother sang to her and that she, in turn, has sung to her daughter.
pyjamas, various dimensions
acrylic, oil, and paper collage on canvas, 198.5 × 188 cm
series of four drawings, watercolour on paper, 21 × 29.7 cm, each
oil on canvas, 98 × 90 cm
acrylic, oil, pastels and collage on canvas, 203 × 478.5 × 2.5 cm
ink, Acrylic, and Oil on Canvas, 50 × 60 cm, each
Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij