Artes Mundi 10 Questionnaire: Mounira Al Solh

Mounira Al Solh is nominated for Artes Mundi 10 alongside Rushdi Anwar, Carolina Caycedo, Alia Farid, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Taloi Havini and Nguyễn Trinh Thi. This year’s 10th anniversary prize is presented with the Bagri Foundation and will be awarded to an established international artist whose practice has ‘significantly contributed to art that resonates with our times’. An exhibition of work by the nominees is now open across five venue partners in Wales, with the seven artists presenting major solo projects that ‘collectively address issues surrounding land use, territory and displacement through histories of environmental change, conflict and enforced migration, conditions that speak to us all today’. The winner will be announced on 25 January. ArtReview is a media partner of Artes Mundi 10.

ArtReview Could you tell us a bit more about your project for Artes Mundi and what form it takes?

Mounira Al Solh I’m mixing pieces that draw connections across subjects and media. I will be showing a series of portraits which continue the work I Strongly Believe In Our Right to be Frivolous (2012–). Those drawings were started when the 2011 Syrian revolution became bloody and dangerous for the people, and they started to escape Syria. Many of them at that time took refuge in Lebanon. Near my studio there were many new people who escaped and settled there for a while. At that time, we had hope in change. I wanted to document that moment, to counter the fact that when I was a child, there was the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), and I wasn’t able to document anything, as I was a child and not able to decide my fate, or change anything. This made me really angry. It felt so unfair that you couldn’t ask them to stop bombing you!

The encounters are personal, and are about meeting with people, when I would invite them to my studio, to have a chat, a coffee, while I’d be writing our conversations on what people call ‘yellow legal pad’. There were people at that time who had escaped the Palestinian camp in Yarmouk, being bombarded by the Assad Regime. There were people from all across Syria. The work was a way to get back to my own Syria, as my mother’s country of origins, but also to represent what was happening in Lebanon on the ground, mirroring to the escalating war in Syria, and how this impacted people from Syria and Lebanon. Though we also spoke about love, drinking, and other things. It is also a way of welcoming people, breaking down barriers, and loosely documenting what was happening.

I wasn’t able to survive with my own family in Lebanon, as I have a daughter, and Lebanon was deteriorating. So as an escape plan I moved back to the Netherlands, where I had studied art and where I was still quite active artistically. This step pushed me see our ‘local’ conflicts with a wider eye. I started drawing people from all parts of the world, to be inclusive, and to learn stories which I realised were all related to each other, even though the people who shared them came from various parts of the world. In Cardiff, I was introduced to an amazing group of individuals, from various backgrounds, and I was able to have conversations and draw them. The encounters were magnificent, and I am very grateful!

I will also present a kind of disassembled tent. A sort of flying dish, that can become a boat or a spaceship perhaps, but it’s made of soft fabrics, some wooden frames or sticks at times, and embroidered collaboratively. The patterns that you see on the tent, connect the piece to mythological stories, and to fauna and flora as well as plants from the sea coast that existed during my childhood in Beirut. The patterns were embroidered with the collaboration of Lebanese women and some family members. Some parts were embroidered by groups of migrant and local women with whom I work in the Netherlands. I also painted by hand each woman’s name to include as part of the tent, as a gesture of communal work, and solidarity.

This tent is meant to include and honour a story of a woman I knew since my youth. I wrote her story in Arabic and in English, silkscreened on fabrics. She was a nurse in Lebanon during the Civil War, and she recounts her romance with a man she wasn’t supposed to marry, as they were from different religions and backgrounds. I also incorporated in the work a sound recording, which I recorded in the same space, with the Oasis One World Choir participants, based on songs about love they wrote and sang on the spot. Some of those songs we also sang during the opening day together.

I will be showing the words of love which Lebanese singer Rima Khcheich uttered in the tent as part of the singing piece, connecting pieces together. These are stitched as a series that you see in the hallways and between spaces in the museum, as love notions, and notions of love can creep where you might not notice.

Finally, in the backspace, I will be showing a magazine, under a pink floating and suspended sheet, a typical ‘newly married couple sheet’. Underneath it, I created another space for reading. Here it’s an issue of NOA (Not Only Arabic) magazine. The magazine has its name from a critical stance towards Arabic language, and how we might in the Arab world recognise many more minorities and communities’ languages. The issue’s topic is about women’s empowering role during the Arab spring.

AR Are there other artists, groups or individuals who serve as an inspiration for your work?

MAS Recently, a book was published about the artist and gallerist Helen Khal in Beirut. It traces moments we have so far not had much access to, except from oral stories told by art teachers or friends from various older generations. It also includes materials about those who frequently worked with and launched Gallery One which created by Helen and her ex-partner, Yusuf al-Khal It reflects the ‘nostalgic’ time, when Beirut was a hub back then, in the wake of the Civil War. The cultural scene in Beirut somehow ‘resisted’ during the Civil War, and today even, still tries to survive.

The music scene was very strong, as it is popular and travels easily across countries, via the radios, in cars and houses and bars, and pubs. In visual art, Lebanese, Armenians, Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians, Saudis, Iraqis, many showed their artworks in Beirut, and in the time after the Civil War, despite everything, our aim was a claim a bit more freedom of speech compared to neighbouring countries.

I am also very inspired by contemporary art and performances, things you see in Amsterdam, or Rotterdam or around, especially things I saw during my studies including loads of classical paintings, which we used to see in books in Beirut, and also, self-initiated projects with collaborating artists and communities. I also take inspiration from studying ancient textiles, and artifacts which were made across different eras in the broader speaking ‘Islamic world’, in the Ottoman and Qajar eras, and far back to Byzantine times – the embroidery and painting back then – and how things connected across cultures back then also.

I also really appreciate the works of outstanding women artists, Mona Hatoum, for example, and pioneers Saloua Raouda Chouchair and Marlene Dumas in painting!

AR As well as working with some of the leading artists of our times, Artes Mundi 10 seeks to reveal something of the most pressing issues facing society at large today. What are some of those issues in relation to your practice and how can an artwork change our perception of or our means of addressing those issues?

MAS I think my works were always a reaction to social matters that I found at stake, or rather issues whereby I felt: I am suffocating, I have to speak up! When I graduated from the Lebanese University, I made a work to denounce how cows were being slaughtered to become meat. At that time, I filmed the slaughterhouse which was in the harbour of Beirut. It was horrible to stand there, in the blood and amongst those who do the slaughter, and I was around 18 at that time. But the outcome didn’t look like militant art. There is always an element that takes it away from ‘militantism’, because, when you grow up during the wars, militantism becomes also another war. And for me, the need to survive, use your imagination, be playful, is also very important! When as a kid you only see death and you’re scared of losing your parents and your loved ones, the only thing you need, is to forget all of this, yet without being detached or blinded, because you can’t.

My art is also my own therapy. Also, because the wars were never finished in our region, and they generate climate and natural disasters, caused by the use of weapons, and by to corrupt local or international developers who would not care about sustainable renovation plans etc. In Beirut, I made a video once with men who swim at the beach, amongst them my father, and how they struggle to find a ‘free’ non-private spot; how masculine their gatherings are, but also, how they have to avoid swimming in sewage. An artwork can change people’s perspectives when it is not perhaps directly didactic. When it is inclusive. And when it finds strategies for us to find other ways of expressing and asking questions. It is also a road whereby we can still discover a lot, and certainly I am interested in that.

AR Do you think art needs to be relevant in those terms, terms that perhaps exist outside the traditional remit of art as a category in and of itself?

MAS According to Etel Adnan, art is best when it can be seen by many, not only in closed-doors museums. And the category of ‘art’ is something found in certain so to speak ‘privileged’ countries. But in some countries, subsidised and officially recognised art hardly exists anyway.

Perhaps there, people might take their children, parents, a whole family, with them to certain events, perhaps in the main square, or in markets, or during feasts to play.

Another example, but more close to black humour – the National Museum of Beirut, an archaeological museum, was on the demarcation line of the war, and a huge mosaic mural was famously used by snipers to shoot from, it is a huge 3.5m-long mosaic depicting animals and a shepherd from Roman times. In this case, ancient art, ‘heritage’, was used instead to shoot at people or to hide behind… It was very ‘organically’ and ironically incorporated and remodeled to fit the war… Anyway, I think, there must be always new languages for us to test and learn from, depending how we are evolving, and the urgencies we face around us. For example, soon when we will be left without clean water, this will invite us to create other ways to think and present, or do together, to fetch our water, and create sustainable ways to clean it…

AR We live in a world in which there is a rise in nationalisms of various types and a global structure that separates people more than it unites. Do you see your work as furthering more general cultural exchange? As bridging some of those cultural divides?

MAS In my paintings, this is perhaps most ‘literally’ clear. In the other works also, where I work and meet with people from various backgrounds, but always most importantly also with their hosts, in these countries, whom often have facilitated our meetings, in order also to maintain trust. When locals initiate exchange projects, such as here at Helen Clifford’s studio at madeinroath [a community of artists in Cardiff], whereby she initiates inclusive projects, along with new-comers, or first generation of migrants for example, seclusion and limitation would be overcome beautifully: on one hand ‘newcomers’ or those who need support feel protected for a while, and welcome; on the other hand, those initiating feel useful, and thus also take a lot of happiness and reciprocal support back with them, instead of coldness and anger, and fear of ‘the other’. Cultural exchange can happen wherever art or coffee or bread is made.

AR Artes Mundi is the largest cash art prize in the UK, offering £40,000 to the winner. Should you win, how do you plan on using the prize money? Do you have a particular project that you would like to use it to realise?

MAS In relation to having been to Cardiff, and because I worked here with local communities, I would like to support the associations who worked with me. I observe the trust they manage to create between people and provide the vital support that you might not even have been able to find back home. The trust is facilitated by a purpose: singing, in a choir, or painting together, working on embroidery projects, food events, workshops etc…

I would love to continue with I Strongly Believe In Our Right to be Frivolous and create performances and perhaps a web- or digital page related to that work (or other things).

And I would love to create another tent, but for using outside: to have such collaborative and significant works, in which stitching and embroidery, stories and fabrics bring people together. Being outside also can open up meetings cantered around creating things outdoors, engaging with nature, or a square…

And I would like to continue make NOA Magazine (issue 5), which will be about places that no longer exist, places related to art, in Lebanon, and in surrounding countries, because of precariousness or other reasons. My NOA (Not Only Arabic) Magazine editors-collaborators will be Lyn Ajan, Virgine Bobin and Salma el Moushtari from Qalqalah collective.

I have also been co-running a space called Modka Beireot recently, with friends and family and colleagues, in the Netherlands and in Beirut. I would like to be able to invite some artists to show their works as part of the Modka Beireot project, or create collaborative ways to connect people together, and performances shown to the public in various towns, whereby it can be shared with marginalised people, and others.

AR This is the tenth edition of Artes Mundi. What role do you think such prizes play within a more general arts ecosystem?

MAS A prize is tricky, it might, whether it’s intended or not, create a competitive atmosphere amongst the artists, we are already winners by being able to come and work here, yet someone has to win. As an artist, we do need platforms to host our works, we do need budgets to create our works, we do need visibility. On the other hand, we do need to survive sickness and support our families most importantly. If artists can’t survive or show their work for a long time, after a while they might quit, or start disbelieving in their work.

As artists, we also need to open dialogues with other artists colleagues; we are a diverse group, the mix is really heart-warming. And it’s interesting for us to mix with audiences from here at Wales. Artes Mundi opens this chance – it’s not located in London, we do not always need to be in the so-called recognised ‘centre’.

The National Museum of Wales, where my work is being hosted, is a vibrant place, with many families visiting, and all sorts of people. It also has a fossil piece from Lebanon, I realised. Here everyone comes to see the dinosaurs and other fascinating creatures – children, grandparents, mothers and students. These people are not usually the public for ‘contemporary art museums’ so it is great we share spaces, our art with the dinosaurs, all seen by children and their grandparents, and people from all sorts of backgrounds come here.

We hope these people would also come to see our works and make their own connections between our contexts and what they see at the National Museum: archives and archaeology that belong not only to the history of the UK but also the whole ecosystem and planet, and which is being well preserved and shown in the galleries around and under our floors, for the lucky ones to visit them.

For Artes Mundi 10, Mounira Al Solh will present works at at the National Museum Cardiff through 25 February.