Mounira Al Solh - Pocket Rhythms
MOUNIRA AL SOLH
Pocket Rhythms
April 20 – August 19, 2023
hamburg
Music Paintings, 2023
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Sfeir-Semler is proud to present MOUNIRA AL SOLH’s second solo exhibition in our Hamburg space, including painting, drawing, textile, installation, video, performance, and sound works.
Music Paintings, 2023
Pocket Rhythms draws its title from the artist’s immersion into popular Arabic music from the 70s and 80s. These omnipresent tunes in war-torn Lebanon would fill gaps between news bulletins, as continuous radio sounds rose in the air from shelter to shelter. The habit remained, and as Al Solh paints, she constantly keeps sound playing in the background. The result is a new series of loud, flamboyant paintings that transpose a sense of immediacy and urgency, and that question the intersection of artistic production and political unrest, the contexts in which works are made and performed, and the role music plays in our collective memory. What starts with lyrics from an iconic song, often ends in a mash up of personal moments, sprawled on canvas.
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In Love in Blood, 2023
In Love in Blood, 2023
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Continuing her investigation of Arabic language and linguistics, Al Solh presents In Love In Blood. The embroideries on textile each illustrates one word from a list compiled by Ibn Qayyim El Jawziyya, a medieval Islamic theologian who lived in Damascus in the 13th century. The collection of Arabic words includes affection, worship, passion, blood, nostalgia, grief, or folly for example, and catalogues more than 50 ways of expressing love, based on the extent, the level, or the nuance of the emotion.
Within the same line of research, she proposes sound pieces that deconstruct emblematic Arabic love songs by Umm Kulthum, and reinterprets them in different dialects, languages, or accents and at various speaking speeds or intonations. This inquiry expands into a performance which the artist presents in collaboration with Jana Saleh.
