Associação Cultural Videobrasil

At twenty-three years of age, after concluding a painting course at the Lebanese University, in 2001, Mounira Al Solh decided that it was time to leave behind the extreme familiarity she had acquired with Beirut, and left to study fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, in Amsterdam. Her choice of the Dutch school was based more on the empathy that she felt for the students at the institution—“They were free and their sense of humor appealed to me”—than on academic or professional reasons. 

A self-defined flâneur, the artist moves in that way, guided by perceptions and pulsions that lead her to different settings, be they the rocks that conceal the swimmer-protagonists in her video series The Sea Is a Stereo, which she started two years ago, be they the streets of the Lebanese capital, where Al Solh did her research in order to record the singing voices in Rawane’s Song (2006). 

Finished in the same year in which the author concluded her stay at the arts academy in Amsterdam, the video was awarded at the 16th International Electronic Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil in 2007. In that same year, the artist also featured in the first pavilion ever to represent Lebanese art in the history of the Venice Biennale, with the group exhibition Forward. 

To the event in Italy, Al Solh took As If I don’t Fit There (2006), a light, upbeat inquiry into the insertion of fictitious authors with various profiles into the art world, their attempts at integrating that circuit, and the paths that they chose when their ambitions of becoming artists stopped being a goal and became part of the past. 

Even though the author’s characters often exist only within the boundaries of their creator’s imagination, the living conditions and situations presented by the artist, according to her, are directly derived from their surroundings, which provide her with the foundations for building a universe linked to the “absurd of existence,” as she defines it. 

One example is the project Reclining Men with Sculpture (2007), born out of Al Solh’s quest to escape the avalanche of ideological material with which she was faced everyday in the streets of her hometown, after the Israeli invasion in 2006. As an outlet for the domination of the “unconscious” perpetrated by personalities of the most diverse political orientations, the artist created stories in which those characters go through artistic experiences, in an approach that humanizes them, at the same time presenting art as a trigger of new realities—unlikely, but possible ones. 

After having attended Gerrit Rietveld, Al Solh was accepted last year to the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, a Dutch institution that offers a residency programme to artists from all over the world for a maximum of two years. That was when the artist, who was granted the Uriòt Prize while in her new place of study, dove into The Sea Is a Stereo, a family project she tends to during her moments of leisure in Beirut. 

In the series of videos, which also includes other material such as objects linked to the routine of the characters, Al Solh portrays the lifestyle and idiosyncrasies of a group of men different from each other in every aspect except a shared predilection: the sea. These Lebanese men temporarily get away from their daily chores, rain or shine, in order to swim, talk, and delight themselves in the mysteries and whims of the Mediterranean Sea. 

The artist knows them from way back: the group is comprised of her father and his friends. The personal odyssey they launch themselves into, seeking mental independence from anything not related to this infallible moment of contemplation, pertains to one of the core issues in Al Solh’s recent work: life in transit, the threshold, the act of existing without ties, of being comfortable in between two (or more) worlds. 

Footage with the swimmers is still in development, and in the future Al Solh aims to do a longer project with them—a feature film. In the meantime, she creates new videos featuring the group and is editing the second issue of “performance-magazine” NOA (2008). “It is a publication that not everyone is authorized to read. The contents of NOA must not be disclosed to all.”