Mounira Al Solh: All Mother Tongues Are Difficult

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is proud to announce the opening of its new show All Mother Tongues Are Difficult by Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh on Thursday April 3rd, 2014, from 7 pm to 9 pm.

In this solo exhibition, Al Solh engages with the concept of language as a mechanism of transmission and traversal. She presents a completely new set of work for the occasion, informed by her readings on language and the voice by authors such as Ahmad Beydoun (Kalamon), Mladen Dolar (A voice and nothing more), and Louis Wolfson (le Schizo et les langues), as well as her experiences with the noa language school, a project initiated with Italian curator Angela Serino in 2013.

Al Solh uses language to examine a route and place of transition, between the mother tongue and languages of immigration. Along these lines, she links the concept of dialects navigating across boundaries with the recent upsurge of the refugee community in the context of Syria today, and the regular practice of emigration from Lebanon. By bringing the personal experiences of herself and her family together with the forces of geopolitics reflected in the plight of displaced Syrians in Lebanon today, Al Solh situates herself within a context where history and biography overlap.