Sfeir-Semler presents ‘Stray Salt’, a solo show by Mounira Al Solh. Running until August 1, 2025, the show is at Sfeir-Semler Downtown, Beirut.
After her representation of Lebanon at La Biennale in Venice, Mounira Al Solh returns home with an exhibition that pursues her inquiry into the construction of national narratives and the reappropriation of myths, from a woman’s perspective. With sculpture, film, painting, drawing and textile works, the show echoes Phoenician Goddess Europa’s forced exile from the shores of Tyr in South Lebanon to Crete in Greece, her mythical journey resonating across time into contemporary displacements.
The exhibition highlights moments of violent rupture, from ancient myths to the ongoing armed conflicts, tracing layers of persistent trauma that have consistently driven many into exile. Yet, within this tide of loss, the artist weaves a fragile thread between past and present, navigating a liminal space heavy with the weight of war’s relentless force, but at the same time playful in its resistance.
Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg.
Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978, Lebanon, lives and works between Beirut and Amsterdam) is a visual artist embracing inter alia installation, painting, sculpture, video, drawing, text, embroidery, and performative gestures. Irony and self-reflectivity are central strategies for her work, which explores feminist issues, tracks patterns of micro-history, bears witness to the impact of conflict and displacement, is socially engaged, and can be political and poetically escapist all at once. Her practice utilizes oral documentation, multidisciplinary collaboration and wordplay to explore themes of memory and loss. Motivated by acts of sharing and storytelling, change and resistance, Al Solh strives to craft a sensory language that defies nationality and creed.
She is the winner of the ABN AMRO Art Award (2023), The Derek Williams Trust Artes Mundi Purchase Prize (2023); received the Uriôt Prize from the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2007) and the Black Magic Woman Award, Amsterdam (2007).
