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In the past decade, Lebanese artists known as the post-civil war generation, have made a furore in the international art world. These include the likes of Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Lina Saneh, Lamia Joreige, and Rabih Mroué. In their work these artists, who all came of age during the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, have been predominantly occupied by an individual and collective history, memory and amnesia, and the politics of representation.
Recently a younger generation of Lebanese artists, all in their early 30s, have stepped in. Building on the thematics and visual language of their slightly older colleagues, these artists bring humor, pop culture, and a saviness of the expectations and pressures of the contemporary art world into the mix. A prime example is the work of Mounira Al-Solh. Placing her at the forefront of her contemporaries in Lebanon is her agile and humourous questioning of how identities and voices – national as well as artistic – might or might not sit together.
Working between her native Beirut and her adopted home in Amsterdam, much of Al-Solh’s work queries the possibilities and impossibilities of roles accessible to contemporary artists, and their impact in a globalised consumer culture. The experience is – to say the least – schizophrenic. And thus comes in the voice-overs, role play, alter egos and dressing-up, as characteristic of her practice.
More often than not, Al-Solh does not provide an answer but keeps pushing questions.
Her video A Double Burger and Two Metamorphoses. Proposal for a Dutch cat, a Dutch dog, a Dutch goat, and finally a Dutch camel (2011) is exemplary of this tactic. Here Dutchness prejudices the art of hosting. A slew of contemporary post-modern philosophers are combined, mixed and shaken into a game of dialogue role-play. Posing alternately as an animal - ingeniously wearing toothbrushes for ears - and as the character Mounira, the subsequent conversation between Mounira, and Mounira as a cat, dog, goat and camel veers from the philosophical to the quotidian and the absurd. The conversation also centers much around the making of the video itself - as such the viewer is never allowed to lose themselves in the performance or the medium, but is constantly reminded that this is a construct.
For her first large-scale solo exhibition in The Netherlands, Al-Solh has chosen to exhibit next to Bassam Ramlawi, her male alter ego. A juice merchant from Beirut, only a few years older than herself, Ramlawi was – as was Al-Solh – educated both in Beirut and in The Netherlands. Through the character of Ramlawi, Al-Solh can tread on territory that she would usually feel uncomfortable venturing into: painting, a machismo, and art as a trade.
Ramlawi’s series of 44 drawings From Waiting Blue to Lingering Yellow (Or Vice Versa) (2010) addresses temporality in its most quotidian and mundane form: namely the instances when one waits for someone or something. Ramlawi draws a snapshot of what occurs when waiting for a friend in the car, at the beach, a glass of mint tea, for something mysterious, or just for a Sunday to pass by. These drawings are overlayed by a transparent orange sheet of paper with parts cut out, revealing the drawing proper. The color and texture are reminiscent of the plastic candy wrappers Ramlawi used to find in his father’s juice shop - a way of wrapping – perhaps partly unwrapping - an event in time.
In the video Seven Reversed Scenes about Bassam Ramlawi (2010) we are introduced to Bassam Ramlawi by Mounira Al-Solh in male drag as the man himself. Complete with faux mustache, hat and pipe, a caricature of an “artiste,” Ramlawi tells us about his love and life, and about a particular period when he could not paint anymore. Here fiction seeps into Al Solh’s own biography. Originally trained as a painter, Al-Solh has experienced her own artistic struggles with painting as a discipline. It seems that through Ramlawi she is re-examining her own relation to the medium.
Al-Solh always insists on having a presence in her work, in some way or other. This is not the case for the series of 19 short videos The Mute Tongue- 19 Arabic Proverbs (2011) where she relays her performance to the Croatian actor Sinisa Labrovic´ who acts out 19 Arabic proverbs in a literal fashion. For example, “Like the deaf in a loud wedding” shows Labrovic´ sitting reading a newspaper at a very loud Lebanese wedding. Here Al Solh visually translates something that is never meant to be taken as literal. However, The Mute Tongue, as is the case of much of Al Solh’s work, is not so much about translation, as it is about movement and mobility between different registers, be they artistic, social, national, geographical, or conceptual.
