The young Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh is currently working on a video entitled The beach is a stereo, a stereo, in which she tells the story of a group of men who live in Beirut on the threshold of being emigrants and immigrants.
There is nothing new about art going into the neighbourhood. In the 1990s, especially, it was common for artists to seek contact with the residents of the neighbourhoods in which they lived, in an effort to make a form of art that had direct sociocultural implications. This tendency seemed to be somewhat on the decline, but is now undergoing a striking revival in response to political influences.
He has lived and worked in Amsterdam’s Zuidoost district for years, speaks the language, listens to the music, organizes parties and exhibitions, and recently even opened up his own gallery, called ‘Fuck’. Jonas Ohlsson is an ‘art honky’ who has found his niche in the black ghetto.
The numbers are impressive. Some clips get downloaded from YouTube over a million times. Activist video clips by young Dutch-Moroccan rappers like Appa, Kempi and Salah Edin hit the right note for a broad group of supporters. Artistically, not all of it is equally fascinating, but the message is clear as a bell.
