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 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.
Responding to the Lebanese Emigrant statue—created in Mexico in the late 1970s, with numerous replicas placed worldwide, including a monumental version installed at Beirut’s port in 2003—Al Solh presents a glazed ceramic sculpture that surveys the viewer from the gallery’s windowfront. Depicting a female traveler instead of a male figure, the piece features a naked woman standing in a shell-like boat called “time” in Arabic. The voyager proudly displays the nail polish on her bare toes, a knee bent as if captured in the act of deliberately moving forward. She pulls behind her a modern carry-on suitcase.
This tension between ancient references and modern times surprises visitors throughout the exhibition. From the ceramic mural pieces to the trompe l’oeil paintings on canvas, Mounira Al Solh intertwines motifs found on antique mosaics, bas-reliefs or Phoenician lettering with depictions of boats, or female figures, all the while keeping to an earthy color palette. In one of the larger works on canvas, the artist combines yellow natural pigments and Phoenician red to reimagine Europa. Instead of being abducted by him, the princess here cradles the half-human-half-bull Zeus, in a stance that negates the damsel in distress narrative. Two sculpture heads clutching their faces with their hands rethink the act of crying as a performative ritual, hollowed out at the top to leave room for a lachrymatory.
In the center of the gallery space, a wooden fishing boat nods to our ancestral links to the sea, a source of sustenance, of economic boon and a passageway all at once. It carries a flat TV screen with Al Solh’s newest video work, Two Airplanes and the Luggage. The animated cartoon video shows Europa fleeing over the water, abandoning her suitcase and the bull that’s an intrinsic part of her story, to escape bombings – and possibly the shackles of her own myth. The artist whistles, hums and buzzes the score herself, mimicking in turn bird chirping, war planes and explosions. Equally dissident, the most recent series of paintings produced for the exhibition are made with acrylic on canvas and celebrate the female as the giver of all life. Reminiscent of Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde, they seek to reframe the role of women throughout centuries, as the fundamental transmitter link that allows history to unfold.
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.
Press release from Sfeir-Semler
Image: Mounira Al Solh. Installation view, Stray Salt, 2025, Sfeir-Semler Downtown, Beirut, Lebanon. Image courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut/Hamburg
