MOUNIRA AL SOLH

Lebanon

Mounira Al Solh studied painting at the Lebanese University in Beirut (LB), and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (NL). With her installations and video work she has participated in several exhibitions in Beirut and Amsterdam. Her video 'Rawane's Song' was screened in Impakt Festival, Utrecht, as well as at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and in Rotterdam. From January 2007-9 she is a resident artist at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam.

MOUNIRA AL SOLH
Canteen Stories
2006, video, 6:37' minutes

In 2003 I arrived in the Netherlands to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. I started to work at the academy's canteen a year later. For the first time, I met people from Israel: fellow students.
I "instrumentalized" the cash counter of the canteen, not only to exchange products, personal belongings and money, but also to exchange and intertwine my own personal narratives from Lebanon, with the personal narratives of my Israeli fellow-students, while I distorted the realistic aspect absurdly. In those accounts, I become a double voiced narrator, scripting "canteen stories" beyond psychological, political and geographical boundaries.