Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The Thoughtful Play at Work in Mounira al-Solh’s Video Art

Video harbours plenty of insipid and jejune art and documentary work. As if aware of her chosen medium’s dirty little secret, Lebanese artist Mounira al-Solh has dedicated the last few years to generating video work whose intelligence doesn’t prevent its being engaging.

Unhinging the documentary premises commonly ascribed to the medium, Solh’s work restages discussions of belonging, representation, and the like—oft-rehearsed in these identity-conscious times. She interrogates the artistic possibilities of inquiry into, and portrayal of, identity, and does so with an apparently frivolous tone, an inverse-gravitas, that belies her serious conceptual concerns.

In her series of fixed-camera compositions As if I Don’t Fit There (2006), the artist is filmed in four minimalist performances. In the first, she says, she sets out to recreate Manet’s 1866 painting The Fifer. The second finds Solh walking toward a camera while receding from view. In another, she poses incongruously in a bikini alongside a Dutch lake. Finally, she stands in a stairwell performing a tune by the iconic Lebanese diva Fairouz.

Accompanying the near-still silence, a text places each tableau within the fictive autobiography, or autobiographies, of a once-successful artist who gave up art to become an artists’ immigration lawyer, the art director of a local television station’s weather report, “an independent trader of false jewellery,” and the wife of a man she married after he complimented her performance at a restaurant.

These disparate, deceptively slight pieces resonate on several levels. Most obvious is the irony in staging virtual still-life (nearly silent) tableaux before a video camera—here largely reduced to recording incidental (or altered) movement and background noise.

The narrative (whose narrator goes out of her way to denigrate video and new-media art) takes up the matter of where art practice “fits” among various other mediated “non-art” practices—whether the reproduction of someone else’s art (Manet or Fairouz), the making of ersatz jewellery and television graphics, or the pursuit of ancillary practices fixed upon career and family.

Some of the same themes are picked up in Solh’s next work. But, as if impatient with the deliberate, fixed-frame renderings of As if I Don’t Fit There, Rawane’s Song (2006) can’t stop moving.

Beginning with its title, so redolent of sentimental filmic representations of Oriental femininity, Rawane’s Song is at once an amusing riff on matters of identity—and, by implication, the proliferation of identity-centred work—and a mock-up of a cinematographic journey of discovery.

This seven-minute exploration begins with the artist’s cheerful, passport photo-sized head framed by a red shoe, from whose toecap it protrudes. The camera shifts to a more-or-less identical shoe, this one containing Solh’s foot, as seen from about chest-height. The lens remains focussed on her feet as she stomps around an anonymously lived-in room.

A text informs the audience how frustrated the narrator was with trying to inhabit the various archetypes of Lebanese identity she’d felt imposed upon her—whether it entail pro-Palestinian political sympathies or putative Phoenician heritage. Having confronted what she is not, the artist confides that she undertook some inquiries meant to define and document this elusive identity.

When she reaches the eponymous song, it turns out not to be one of those classic pieces performed by Arabic music icons like Umm Kalthoum or Fairouz. Rather, it is a relatively recent number by pop tart Nancy Ajram—here sung karaoke-style by the fictive Rawane, and recorded on a cassette tape with Solh’s cheerful, passport photo-sized head affixed to it.

In the final stage of her journey, Solh’s camera discovers her two Lebanese passports—one with a blue cover, the other red—sitting parallel one another on a white countertop. The camera rotates 180 degrees over the passports and zooms close so the screen frames the French tri-colour.

The final tune of Rawane’s Song is The Marseillaise, hummed by the artist to accompany this symbol of Lebanon’s clichéd (yet, in certain circles, lingering) colonial identity or, in any case, of the integral place of travel in that identity.

In her most-recent work, a series called The Sea Is a Stereo (2007-2008), Solh again takes up the issue of migration as a means of retrieving art from representation. The work, presently a triptych, is more formally elaborate, however, and conceptually daring.

A Buttock Sitting Comfortably on a Watery Threshold, the triptych’s first frame, is a lecture in which Solh introduces the liminal space between emigration and immigration. Since the period between deciding to emigrate and being accepted as an immigrant can be a long one, she says, emigrants enter a space neither here nor there.

Evoking her own experience as an art student in the Netherlands, Solh suggests that this limen (or threshold) between here and there is not without its comforts. Indeed, being metaphorical, a threshold can just as easily be fluid (watery) as solid.

The artist now arrives at her subjects, a group of Lebanese men of varying ages, classes, and regional backgrounds, who share the “watery threshold” of the Mediterranean coast, regularly turning their backs on Beirut to swim in the sea. Once the men are introduced, the lecture ends, without their uttering a word.

A Buttock Sitting Comfortably on a Watery Threshold is risky. The lecture places a conceptual framework around a much-mined vein of Beirut pop culture—the, generally male, practice of swimming in the Mediterranean from the rocky ledges that serve as beaches on the city’s northwest coast.

As a form of address, however, the recorded lecture is off-putting compared to the chatty, scattershot narrative of her 2006 works. The irony built into the lecture helps. Solh wears a frock appropriate for a 19th-century schoolmarm. Still images of herself and her subjects are interspersed among desultory photos of Dutch livestock.

Without any input from the men who purportedly illustrate Solh’s point, the lecture mostly leaves you contemplating the shortcomings of recorded lectures.

The men do speak in Paris without a Sea, the triptych’s second frame. In this energetic and amusing piece, the off-frame artist interviews her informants at the beach, in various stages of undress, or indoors, where she has them dress as though at the beach or else don a diving mask.

Most of her rapid-fire questions were forewarned in the lecture—‘What is your name?’ ‘Why do they call you that?’ ‘When and where did you learn to swim?’ ‘What is the colour of the sea?’ ‘Who is the best swimmer among you?’ ‘What is your relationship to Halls cough drops?’

Solh remains invisible throughout, and her subjects’ voices remain inaudible. Rather, you hear Solh ask questions in Lebanese Arabic, sometimes French, then see the men reply while she speaks their responses, in synch.

Though it follows nominally documentary conventions, Solh’s surreal mediation (diving masks, dubbing, and the like) lends Paris without a Sea a comic texture that echoes Rawane’s Song. Solh’s inquiries elicit brief, idiosyncratic anecdotes from the men about their relationship to their bodies as well as to the sea.

Audiences might detect an amusing fluidity of their practice of masculinity—one that could only be accentuated by Solh’s “effeminising” voiceover—suggesting that watery thresholds lie between more facets of identity than mere nationality.

It would be unfair to comment extensively upon Let’s Not Swim Then!, the third frame of The Sea Is a Stereo—still a work in progress as this essay is being written.

In one incarnation, however, the work plays segments of the men at the beach, as though discreetly or surreptitiously observed, and juxtaposes them with others in which Solh’s informants respond, in writing, to her representations of them.

These men seem more like collaborators than informants. That said, there is no way to confirm whether the written responses attributed to them are real—whether Solh dutifully showed them her rushes, recorded their responses, and disclosed them unadulterated—edited, or manufactured. That doesn’t matter. The documentary that The Sea Is a Stereo might have been has been dissected like a worm into its three representational voices, all of which belong to the artist.

Other artists and filmmakers in the Arab world have attempted to mine the seam of cultural and gender identity. Some play up the putative exoticism of place, while others pursue a didacticism that imprisons aesthetics within the parochial details of political history and present injustice.

Crafted with a disarming wit, Solh’s work is inspired by the representative act itself, scrutinised from the calm (if not the tranquillity) of the interstitial nowhere.

Jim Quilty is a Beirut-based Canadian journalist. The film critic of Lebanon’s The Daily Star newspaper, he has written about the politics, arts, and cultural production in the Middle East for a decade now. He has published in Bidoun and ArtReview as well as such specialist magazines as Middle East International, Middle East Report, and The Electronic Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, and participated in various academic and media conferences and symposia. He is interested in the interrelationship of politics and cultural production—both in the impact of politics [as most broadly defined] in conditioning the creative process and in how factors of political-economy facilitate and inhibit the production and reception of art.