Mounira Al Solh

Mounira is a visual artist embracing inter alia drawing, painting, video, installations, text, sculpture, embroidery, and performative gestures. Her work often bears witness to the impact of conflict and displacement, while using humor as a tool to survive. In other words, her works can be political and poetically escapist at once. Her practice relies on oral documentation, multidisciplinary collaboration and wordplay to explore themes of memory and loss, feminism and social matters related to survival. Motivated by acts of sharing and storytelling, change and resistance, Al Solh strives to craft a sensory language that defies nationality and creed, whereby most recently mythology has been the chore of interest. In 2008, Al Solh started NOA Magazine (Not Only Arabic), a collaborative initiative co-edited with collaborators such as Mona Abu Rayyan and Qalqalah collective. She co-founded with Angela Serino NOA Language School in Amsterdam (2013), which functioned as a temporary research platform for investigations into the relationships between language and immigration. Al Solh represented Lebanon, at the 60th Venice Biennale, in her solo exhibition “A Dance with her Myth”. She is the winner of the ABN AMRO Art Award (2023). She is also one of seven shortlisted artists for the Artes Mundi 10 prize (2023). She learned the double bass at the national conservatory of music in Lebanon, while she studied painting at the Lebanese University in Beirut (1997–2001) and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (2003–2006). She was also a research resident at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2007–2008).