Mounira Al Solh

These twelve drawings in ink, pencil and colour on yellow lined paper form one work, displayed together, and are part of Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh’s ongoing series I Strongly Believe in Our Right to be Frivolous which was begun in 2012 and amounts to over 500 drawings. Each work shows a singular or group portrait, annotated with various amounts of Arabic, and sometimes English, text. The use of paper torn from a notepad gives the drawings a deliberately humble, everyday quality.

The drawings are records of conversations Al Solh has had with displaced individuals, groups and families since 2012. These conversations started in her neighbourhood in Beirut as the crisis in neighbouring Syria developed, bringing in huge numbers of refugees to the region and particularly Lebanon. Inviting newcomers to her studio or a nearby café, Al Solh listened to their stories, drew their portraits and tried to capture key phrases of their conversations. She varied her drawing style in response to the preferences of her sitters. She chose to make her drawings on a yellow legal pad to serve as a reminder of the bureaucratic and legal limbo many of the sitters find themselves in, as well as registering the mobile nature of their production.

Al Solh shares her own experience of conflict with her sitters, experiences that include growing up in the 1980s in war-torn Lebanon. During this time, she fled to Damascus to stay with relatives on her mother’s side. ‘It sounds ironic now but Syria was our refuge,’ she explained. ‘So making this work has also been a way for me to understand my own childhood, a way to process the trauma we all went through.’(Quoted in Finkel 2018, accessed 11 October 2020.)

The drawings are displayed as a group, showing the variations in style and stories shared between Al Solh and her sitters. The artist makes English translations of the texts available in the display space, often to the side in the form of a separate object, playing with the layers of accessibility/inaccessibility registered in many of the accounts of her sitters. Some drawings include poems and quotes. Others have no text as a reflection of the silence of the sitter. Each drawing is specific to the moment of encounter between the artist and the sitter.

The title, I Strongly Believe in Our Right to be Frivolous, takes its name from a statement by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish whose work expressed how he emotionally navigated exile. The collective of over five hundred drawings shows the magnitude of Al Solh’s ongoing project, while also returning individuality to her sitters who might otherwise be lost in the expanding statistics of the humanitarian crisis.

As the series expands, Al Solh has also conversed with Afghans, Bengalis, Somalis and Ethiopians, creating portraits in Amsterdam, Athens, Kassel and Chicago. The different locations of the drawings and the multitude of backgrounds of her sitters reveal the global, transnational and intergenerational extent of the refugee crisis. Al Solh’s shared experience of war and displacement with her sitters indicates how seemingly disparate people can be connected but also how quickly these roles can reverse.

These drawings and conversations are a foundational aspect of Al Solh’s artistic practice, grounded in her community-driven, conversation-based process. From these initial discussions, Al Solh expands her visual language and creative investigations into video installations, embroidery, painting and performative gestures. At the core of these expansive works are the initial collaborations and time spent between Al Solh and her sitters as captured in this series of drawings.

Further reading
Jori Finkel, ‘Brief Encounters, Enduring Portraits of the Displaced’, New York Times, 7 February 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/arts/design/art-institute-of-chicago-mounira-al-solh-lebanon.html, accessed 11 October 2020.
Hendrik Folkerts (ed.), Mounira Al Solh: I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, Milan 2019.

Tamsin Hong
October 2020