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.

You live in Amsterdam. Why did you choose the Netherlands? 

Two years after finishing my course at the Lebanese University in Beirut, I realized I needed to go to another city. For reasons unclear to me, no longer could I be a flâneur in Beirut at that moment. I believe I was a flâneur since the day I learned to walk the streets with my father or mother around Beirut, way before I knew about or was able to read Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Beirut has a series of alleys in between houses and buildings, empty, deserted plots that made it the ideal city for an amateur flâneur. In Beirut, even though there was no official war in that particular moment, you could sense that people hated and discriminated each other. Tourists and expatriates had returned to the country; the center and other parts of the city underwent a massive renewal; there was a notable increase in trade flow. I would go to the same bar on Hamra Street in Beirut almost every day, it was called The Barometer, and I would drink until four in the morning. I had never left Beirut, I was twenty-four years old and thought the world was limited to Hamra Street and Corniche, Zarif, Cola, and Barbir, which are different areas of the city. For a change, Jemayzé and Ashrafieh. I had the “Hamra syndrome” and, like many other people, I still have it. To the flâneur, the city is a labyrinth. Beirut, however, was becoming more of a comfortable room than a labyrinth to me.
At that time, the most convincing reason for living abroad was to study. The Rietveld Academie was the ideal place for me, for there not only was I able to get to know, I could also compare myself to young artists from all over the world. In Amsterdam, as art students, we float across “castrated” cultures. Nothing is real to us, and everything is real at the same time, and that helped me try to discover who I was. After three years, I finished my studies at the Rietveld Academie and was accepted at Rijksakademie. From 2006 onwards, I started living in Beirut and Amsterdam.
Working with my project The Sea Is a Stereo, still under development, has given me the chance to be a flâneur in Beirut once again. I am a flâneur among those beachgoers who turn their backs every day to the city in which they live, and swim onto the horizon as if they were about to vacate it. In The Sea Is a Stereo, I give a lecture in which I compare my status as a student in Amsterdam to that of swimmers in Beirut, and to me we have decided to be on the threshold between emigration and immigration. They inhabit a space that is made of water. In Amsterdam, I am far from my parents, my tribe, my language, my surrounding family. Making some other street into my favorite place, turning myself into an immigrant in the wrong place, perhaps, at the wrong time, perhaps, being “a stranger to myself.”
Quoting Kristeva: “The foreigner has changed his discomforts into a base of resistance, a citadel of life. Moreover, had he stayed home, he might perhaps have become a dropout, an invalid, an outlaw... Without a home, he disseminates on the contrary the actor’s paradox: multiplying masks and ‘false selves’ he is never completely true nor completely false, as he is able to tune in to loves and aversions the superficial antennae of a basaltic heart.”

In your work I was able to detect a touch of irony and humor, and it seems central to your creation a quest to destroy stereotypes regarding what it is to be a Lebanese and an Arab, like the one about having your life conditioned by faith and politics. 

I am not as ironic as it seems. If you have a second look at my work, you will perhaps realize that I am more like Kristeva’s “stranger to myself” and an existentialist. But it is also true that I am ironic. I do not regard it as a goal in my work; I believe that this humor has more to do with the absurd of existence. Humor sometimes helps me make characters and stories more human. 
For example, when I made Reclining Men with Sculpture, I really wanted to try and think that art, as well as political leaders, is typically a human creation. That was after the Israeli invasion in 2006, when the civil war began with posters and images of political leaders all over the streets in Beirut. It was incredible: you could not dream of anything else. Those politicians and leaders would go real deep into your unconscious mind. If you were to leave home to go to the grocery store, you would see Hariri and his son ten times, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Hezbollah, more than twenty times, Nabih Berri, Walid Junblat, general Aoun in posters and banners covering huge buildings, and dangling in the middle of the streets.
There was nothing to be done about it; we had to live like that. But I wanted to change that and, instead of having them control my imagination, I started to create fictional situations for them, in order to make them into people that had the same cultural tastes and the same needs as I do. That is why you will see them at the Venice Biennale or the Tehran museum of modern art. Those are funny or maybe quite absurd settings.
As for the second part of your question, I sometimes think war is a sort of opium. In Beirut, for instance, the war keeps us busy, we do not have to face boredom, as in Amsterdam. We have a reason for everything: our failures, our depressions, the fact that we are poor, rich, ignorant, corrupt, drunk, for not reading enough, for having a headache, for not combing our hair... The people that I knew who committed suicide did so when there was no war. When the conflict was going on they would not dare to commit suicide, or maybe they were too busy with survival strategies. 
When I made Rawane’s Song, I had seen, in the Netherlands and Europe, a huge amount of works of art and conferences on the Middle East. Unfortunately, most were not critical enough. All they did was say: “We are exotic victims, come and see us.” To me that is unacceptable, and I made Rawane’s Song as a reaction to that attitude. That is why there are some politically incorrect parts in it. I wanted to be more honest, and the only way that I could do it was by appearing to be naïve.
Nevertheless, I would not say that my artistic concern is to disrupt stereotypes linked to what it means to be a Lebanese and an Arab. Maybe this aspect is openly approached in Rawane’s Song as an initial layer, but it would be limiting to say that that is the main concern of my artistic practice. Due to the fact that, as I have mentioned before, I am above all a flâneur. Or at least that is how I feel right now. According to Tabucchi, Pessoa needed no more than a chair and a desk to be able to travel. His chair and his desk were his legs, which took him far. I envy him, in a way. In the streets of Amsterdam, I believe you must ride a bicycle in order to be a flâneur. And I like doing that, I like pedaling without having to go anywhere. In Beirut, it is impossible to ride a bike, the city is too mountainous. Walking is the ideal thing, and, as I said before, it was by looking at the swimmers in Beirut that I became a flâneur again. 

How did you discover the characters in the series The Sea Is a Stereo?

As a matter of fact, I did not discover them. They are all my father’s swimming pals. They hang out together all the time, and I am always with them, so it happened naturally. But I must admit that I thought about doing work with them as early as 2005. Abou Sakhra, just like some of the other swimmers, loves to be creative in front of the camera, and that gives him the opportunity to feel good looking and eternal, which is something we all need, in one way or another, as human beings. While I was making The Sea Is a Stereo, many times I thought of Jean Rouch and the way in which he created a film with the people he was recording as a sociologist. I find it impressive how they became actors after having worked with him for years. I dream that one day me, my father, Abou Sakhra, and the others will feel so comfortable together that we may improvise a film. Anyway, the idea for this particular work is that it is still in progress. In Beirut, there are many different groups, swimming in different places, but I am mostly interested in the men surrounding my father, and the work gradually becomes broader and broader.
When I was studying painting at the Lebanese University, in Rawché, I spent two years with Lina, Mahmoud, and Nagi, my best friends, swimming every day at Dalieh, the same beach that those men sometimes go to. I would stay at the beach even if it was raining. Sometimes my father would stay with us. He swims every day, for the past twenty years. Every day, he dedicates one hour of his routine to it, no matter what. With Lina, Mahmoud, and Nagi, I stayed immersed on Dalieh for two years. We were aware of the fact that it would make us strangers in Beirut without leaving the city, and that it would help us to be like a group of flâneurs. We were in Beirut, but we were not there. The sea somehow swallows up the sounds of the city, you can see it from atop the mountain, but you do not hear it.

Art takes on an anecdotal character in many of your works. It is not at the center of events, and is part of an innocent past of characters such as the girl who sang like her grandmother and then became a housewife. What type of relations do you like to make between life and art? 

Making art to me is very close to being who you are. What I mean is I do not separate art from life. Even though my work pretends to be fictional at times, it all comes from living experiences, and from the present that is taking place right now in front of my eyes or under my skin, inside myself, my “strange self.” That can also be seen in As if I Don’t Fit There, in which I wanted to show that whether you make art or you are a lawyer or a housewife, as you have mentioned, there is no big difference, because at the end of the day you define everything based on the way you view things, and not the opposite. Thus, perhaps we are back at the point where what seemed anecdotal to you, is more of an existential thing to me.

The NOA magazine project is also quite ironic, as it is a quasi-secret publication: you prescreened the readers and led them to a specific location in order to read the magazine. Which were the purposes of that project?

NOA is more of a performance-magazine. It is a publication that not everyone is authorized to read. And even though it is a magazine, I printed no more than one or two copies of each number. People are not allowed to take it home in order to read it comfortably in their private spaces. It is a very complex work, and I am starting to work on the next edition right now. The first issue is entitled Treason Is like a Bible. The second issue is still untitled, because it is in progress. I cannot tell you now why NOA has to be restricted, and not open to a broad public, but it is definitely not because I am trying to be ironic. The reason is more vital and urgent. It has to do with safety, because the contents of NOA must not be disclosed to all. 

What are your upcoming projects?

I am preparing the next issue of NOA little by little, and I like the fact that it is based on teamwork. The coeditors are Mona Abu Rayyan, Fadi El Tofeili, and Noa Roi, and the producer is Christine Tohme. The creative director is Lynn Othman, and that makes NOA magazine very special to me. I must thank them for helping me make NOA and I hope that we may continue doing it together. I am also preparing new works, some of them for The Sea Is a Stereo. I am making the video Let’s Not Swim Then!, and I would like to finish it soon. I am also starting to work on brand new projects that I am showcasing at the Open Studios in the Rijksakademie, as well as the videos and photographs that I recently created for The Sea Is a Stereo. 

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.”

Artistic panorama

The artist’s official Web site, to air in October, will bring some of her work, the projects she is developing, essays, news reports, analyses of her work, and information on her personal and professional trajectory.

Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts

Based in Beirut, it promotes cultural events and aims to foster artistic practice in the country. If offers an archive of documents on contemporary art and publishes books in Arabic and English.

Lebanese cradle

The Web site of the Lebanese University, an institution in which Mounira Al Solh studied art from 1997 to 2001. Free-of-charge, the organization currently counts on seventy thousand students and four thousand professors-researchers.

Dutch melting pot

Web site of the Rijksakademie, an institute in Amsterdam that promotes artistic residencies, with fifty students developing projects for periods of up to two years, and which organizes the PRIXDEROME.NL award, the oldest in the Netherlands.