Mounira Al Solh

And Europa fled / En Europa sloeg op de vlucht / عندما رحلت أوروبا
2026
Photo: Django van Ardenne

Mounira Al Solh grew up during the Civil War in Lebanon that began in 1975, since which time violence has been inflicted on the country from all sides—most recently in March 2026, when foreign military bombardment resumed and over a million people were displaced within days. Through painting, sculpture, video, and textile, the artist navigates identity, migration, trauma, and gender informed by a love of craftsmanship and storytelling. Al Solh moves between intimate personal memory and collective political experience with joy and humor, a lightness she considers a right and form of resistance. Here she presents a monumental sculpture of a naked woman rising from a Murex shell—the ancient creature whose purple dye brought prosperity to the Phoenicians and which grew scarce due to over-exploitation. Larger than human scale, the figure carries a suitcase, a mobile phone, and an oar, collapsing ancient and present time into one body. A Phoenician boat sits atop her head, her body pierced by bullets. The work extends Al Solh’s exploration of Phoenician mythology departing from her 2024 installation for the Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale A Dance with her Myth. This new work responds to a bronze monument to those who left during famine and war, and erected at the Port of Beirut in 2003. The central figure in the monument by Ramiz Barquet, a Mexican artist of Lebanese descent, is male. In her work Al Solh insists the figure be a woman: often first in their families to leave, carrying children and futures across water. To float, she reflects, is to survive. The work was made in part with a ship builder from South Lebanon who fled the bombing and arrived in Al Solh’s studio—the war not a reference but reality. Lebanon’s ongoing violence, Arnhem’s wartime wounds, and colonialism meet not as history but as living memory.

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