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.
embroidery on textile, 60 × 66.5 cm
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.
oil on canvas, 202 × 290 cm
ink, acrylic, oil and paper collage on canvas, 100 × 68 cm
ink, acrylic, oil and paper collage on canvas, 100 × 70 cm
Continuing her investigation of Arabic language and linguistics, Al Solh presents In Love In Blood. The embroideries on textile each illustrates one word from a list compiled by Ibn Qayyim El Jawziyya, a medieval Islamic theologian who lived in Damascus in the 13th century. The collection of Arabic words includes affection, worship, passion, blood, nostalgia, grief, or folly for example, and catalogues more than 50 ways of expressing love, based on the extent, the level, or the nuance of the emotion.
embroidery on textile, 56.5 × 62.5 cm
embroidery on textile, 50 × 63 cm
embroidery on textile, 71 × 82 cm
The exhibition also includes a textile installation, from Al Solh’s ongoing series of tent works, that are based on her collection of stories by and about women. The tents, a nod to the canopies powerful (male) rulers used to sit under, are assembled to create a secluded refuge, and all have names of the hours of the day or night embroidered at the top in Arabic calligraphy, alluding to the passing time. In this most recent version, the artist installs a beach parasol in the gallery space, with two beach chairs and a video work that exposes surreal situations, resulting from the harsh economic crisis that Lebanon is going through: snippets of people counting enormous amounts of devaluated Lebanese pounds alternate with views of the sea that is suffering from the consequential environmental crisis.
embroidered beach parasol, textile, two beach chair, video, sound, 235 × 211 cm
A central aspect of Mounira Al Solh’s practice is a continuing recording of stories, those of displaced people, migrants, or wanderers, those of women who have fought oppressive systems, those of persons who went through ordeals, and lived to transmit this oral history to their children. However, for once, with the series 13 April, 13 April, 13 April the artist looks at herself instead, confronting her own vulnerabilities, intimate desires, hopes, and pain, using nudity as a radical act of self-examination. Drawn with ink and blood, the series is titled after the Lebanese civil war which broke out on April 13, 1975, the repeating date rising like a lament.
drawings on paper, various dimensions
Within the same line of research, she proposes sound pieces that deconstruct emblematic Arabic love songs by Umm Kulthum, and reinterprets them in different dialects, languages, or accents and at various speaking speeds or intonations. This inquiry expands into a performance which the artist presents in collaboration with Jana Saleh.
