À la santé des allies

Mounira Al Solh
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1978.
She lives and works in Beirut and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

With humor and affection, Mounira Al Solh captures the political eruptions of her home country of Lebanon and the painful disruptions of being an emigrant to The Netherlands. Through performance and role-play, her videos explore how speech, translation, and transliteration impact the visual imagination. Using her voice she usurps those of others, either by dubbing over her male interlocutors or by assuming the scripted dialogue of animals and other fictive characters. Frequently, Al Solh interrupts her own authorship, and by extension her identity as an artist, by works she attributes to her male alter ego, the Beiruti juice merchant and painter Bassam Ramlawi. NOA (Not Only Arabic), a limited-edition magazine Al Solh founded in 2008, is an ongoing, collaborative venture to confront language as a site of transmission. In addition to unwinding knotty concepts such as “treason” and “arrest,” readers are required to read the magazine during a specified time and in an appointed location, thereby transforming the interaction into a reciprocal, creative act. NOA has since expanded into seminars, videos, performances, invented dictionaries, and a language school.
Accompanied by a set of embroideries, Al Solh’s latest multimedia installation A la santé des alliés recounts her maternal and paternal ancestors’ experiences in Lebanon and Syria during World War I and the Nasserite and pan-Arab revolutionary movements of the 1950s and ’60s. Using archival images alongside photocopies of family photographs carefully painted over in gouache, the installation is a continuing investigation into how historical upheavals are registered as personal or family traumas. Al Solh delicately obscures the faces of her family members, using her fingers to blot them out or covering them over with wrappers and other flotsam, reflecting the ways in which she selectively conceals and reveals other aspects of her ancestors’ narratives. By introducing fantastical elements into the retelling of their survival, Al Solh restores unuttered desires and aspirations to these two extraordinary relatives and absurdity and contradiction to their stories of daily life amid tumult.