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For her presentation in Lebanon’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Al Solh delves into a millennia-old history, from a time before the European imperial tales, and envisions alternative interpretations of Europa’s story. Combining painting, drawing, ceramic masks and a film, she narrates her own versions of ancient myths. As I later learn, the symbiotic relation between the artist and her work continues, with the painted figure of bull-carrying Europa becoming one of many characters in the film that ‘perform’ by means of animation, while Al Solh herself, albeit in a supporting role, performs in the film as well. The artist describes her approach as taking a feminist perspective on myth, from the viewpoint of her side of the Mediterranean. ‘Many of these origin myths were written by ancient and over-familiar male Greek authors. But what if you consider these stories from the perspective of the places where they actually originate?’

Displacement

The shift towards myth and origin stories marks a significant departure from Al Solh’s previous works, which often focus on personal stories of women confronting present-day patriarchal oppression, particularly in the context of ongoing conflicts in and around her country of origin. This combination of personal as well as collective histories is echoed in how the artist works both individually and collaboratively: in addition to her autonomous painting practice, she frequently collaborates with local groups and communities on large-scale textile or video installations. Al Solh explains that her studio serves as a sanctuary where she can retreat from the turmoil in Lebanon and focus on painting. Her brightly-coloured canvases reflect her own experiences of loss, trauma and displacement. As a child, Al Solh lived through more than a decade of the Lebanese Civil War, after which profound tensions and dysfunctions continued in the country.

In her current exhibition at Amsterdam’s H’Art Museum, organised on the occasion of her winning the ABN Amro Art Award, Al Solh revisits her childhood experiences of growing up in a war-torn environment. For this project, the artist invited a group of women, with both local and migrant backgrounds, to participate in the practice of collective embroidery. She had previously collaborated with them on an installation for which they collectively embroidered their favourite words of love on fabric. For this recent project, Al Solh developed her installation around a repetitive ritual from her own childhood. Whenever she could not sleep at night for fear of being killed in a bombing, her mother let her cut holes in her pyjamas to then sew them back together, a ritual which calmed her down.

At the exhibition’s grand opening at the H’Art Museum, I noticed the presence of her collaborators. It was a tense moment: as we celebrated the art prize honouring a work about how life-defining and traumatic it is to experience war, knowing that so many children’s lives were being taken, Lebanon was currently being bombed, thousands were displaced, and not far from the Lebanese border the Palestinian genocide was unfolding. That same evening, just after the festivities had concluded, the results of the Dutch parliamentary elections were announced: a resounding victory for the populist and openly Islamophobic PVV. As I watched the results, I thought of the women and how they were being told by an unprecedentedly large group of Dutch people that they were not welcome here. While Al Solh had made a gesture of collective solidarity by inviting the group to the award ceremony, the election results conveyed a starkly different message.

Collecting and telling stories lies at the core of Al Solh’s artistic practice. During our conversation, the artist refers to another work she created recently for the National Museum Cardiff in Wales on the occasion of Artes Mundi 10. For that project, she focused on narratives about the challenges faced by women around her, to convey that all women, to varying degrees, experience the same issues. At her invitation the women wrote down their stories in their own words. Each story was then applied onto the fabric of a tent reminiscent of the ceremonial tents used by emperors and kings in the Middle East to demonstrate power and authority. The tent was originally intended to be suspended from the ceiling at the museum, but the weight proved too great. ‘The ceiling couldn’t hold it, it was too heavy!’, Al Solh recounts. ‘Eventually we placed it on the ground, where it resembled an alien spaceship of sorts.’ The tent served as a refuge for visitors to come in and read these personal accounts; a safe haven made by those who, in the midst of various forms of oppression, had found their own ways to reclaim their power.

One of the stories recounts a woman’s experience of being hospitalised due to domestic violence injuries and meeting a new love, who was of a different faith. They eventually built a new life amidst the turmoil of a civil war in which their respective groups were fighting each other. Inspired by this real life story of love and resilience, Al Solh selected a song about love and peace from the Oasis One World Choir’s repertoire – a choir made up of people who have sought refuge in Wales and rebuilt their lives in a completely new culture and language. The song became part of the installation, with Al Solh inviting the choir to perform it at the exhibition’s opening. Reflecting on the experience, she remarks: ‘We all spoke different languages, but the language of music transcended these barriers.’

Oral histories

In Venice, the Lebanese pavilion can be found at the Arsenale, once a bustling shipyard and weapons depot. At this site of historic grandeur, trade and war, in the midst of a historic biennale where many nations and cultures converge, Al Solh has returned to the early history of Lebanon, when it was still called Phoenicia.  ‘After the devastating August 4th explosion in 2020 in the port of Beirut, I felt I had to make work around my own past and the origins of Lebanon.’

Al Solh describes how the Phoenicians, through their extensive maritime trade, spread their alphabet, a precursor to both European and Arabic scripts, around the Mediterranean. The Phoenicians were sailors who traded in cedar wood, which was crucial for the construction of boats, and the Tyrian purple dye extracted from murex shells. Thousands of shells had to be cracked open to colour a tiny piece of cloth, making it the colour of power and wealth. The artist explains that the Phoenicians never aspired to become a great empire and always remained in a position of constant negotiation with the major powers around them – similar to Lebanon’s political position today.

In the centre of the pavilion stands the skeleton of a ship that Al Solh had made in Lebanon by local artisans. Its sails feature projections of a film in which the artist narrates her own versions of ancient myths, combining acted scenes with animated paintings and drawings. The original artworks are arranged throughout the space around the ship. Through this multimedia installation, Al Solh playfully reinterprets traditional narratives, constantly asking, ‘why do we see things in one specific way and not in another?’

In Al Solh’s version of the story, the murex shell was discovered not by the dog of the Phoenician deity Melqart, but by a pregnant stray dog. Instead of clothes and textiles being dyed with the precious Tyrian purple extracted from these shells, in Al Solh’s story red onions, cabbage and beetroot are used. Similarly, in her retelling of the myth of Europa, the protagonist is not portrayed as a passive victim who is seduced and dominated by Zeus, but as a multifaceted figure who plays an active role in her own destiny through various storylines depicted in the paintings. In one painting, Europa stands harmoniously among young cattle, in others she carries a bull on her back, or rolls a bull’s head around in a glass jar. In another painting, Europa has turned her back to us. Her head is transformed into that of a bull, and beside her stands a suitcase; she’s ready for departure. Two giant blossoming artichokes form an arc around her. Towards the bottom of the canvas the artist has painted a hippopotamus and a Minoan snake goddess: symbols of fertility and renewal of life.

Al Solh underscores the significance of oral histories and storytelling as repositories of experiences marked by despair and oppression. Simultaneously, she blurs the lines between fiction and reality, infusing existing narratives with a wealth of imaginative ideas and playful vigour: ‘A myth is simply a myth! Yet, sometimes, these narratives are so deeply ingrained in people’s minds that they take precedence over reality. People have even waged wars over these stories.’

In these times of war, escalating polarisation and societal alienation, Al Solh demonstrates how narratives from the past still resonate, emphasising that the struggles of others are also our own. She adds, ‘For me, it’s not about narrating some grand tale, like the prestigious narrative about the murex shells that I was taught in school. I want to reconsider mythology, such as the tale of Europa, which in Lebanon is not told with the same pride as it might be in Europe, and is brushed off as mere fiction. The exhibition is an attempt to reclaim our own narratives, from our own viewpoint, asking whose stories endure, and whose are forgotten?’