Exhibition by the eleventh ABN AMRO Art Award winner Mounira Al Solh at H’ART Museum

Al Solh (Lebanon, 1978) is a storyteller who links her personal history as a Lebanese woman and immigrant with current themes such as identity, politics, and feminism. In doing so, she employs a range of materials. She embroiders and paints, uses language and music, and creates magazines, installations, and performances. Moreover, working collaboratively with others plays an important role in her work alongside her individual studio practice.

Lebanese civil war

In Nami Nami Noooom, Yalla Tnaaam, Al Solh returns to her childhood in a civil war-ravaged Lebanon. In the evening, if bombardments were going on, her mother would allow her to cut holes into her pyjamas and then carefully sew them back up with a needle and thread. It calmed her when explosions kept her from falling asleep. For this exhibition, she repeated that meditative, healing activity alongside a group of women with both local and migratory backgrounds in the Netherlands and Lebanon. She incorporated the pyjamas into a new installation that can be seen for the first time in H'ART Museum. For the paintings and drawings on paper and cloth shown in the exhibition, Al Solh drew inspiration from dreams and nightmares. With the title of the exhibition, she refers to two Arabic lullabies from her youth that her mother sang to her and that she, in turn, has sung to her daughter. The exhibition is open to the public from November 23, 2023 to May 15, 2024.

From the jury report

"Al Solh is a talented artist whose oeuvre can be considered both personal and political, and seductive as well as activist. The jury has great appreciation for the way in which Al Solh, residing alternately in Lebanon and the Netherlands, uses these vantage points to combine cultures and experiences while actively engaging her shifting environment through collaboration."

ABN AMRO Art Award

The ABN AMRO Art Award is being granted for the eleventh time this year. The winner receives a monetary award of 10,000 euros, an exhibition at H'ART Museum in Amsterdam and in the ABN AMRO Art Space, as well as a publication of their work, designed by Irma Boom Office. In addition, work by the winner is purchased for the ABN AMRO Art Collection. With the Art Award, ABN AMRO offers support to artists as they develop and a platform for them to reach as wide an audience as possible. This is consistent with the bank's sponsorship policy of speeding up the transition to a world of equal opportunities for all. It does so by recognizing individuals, clubs, and organizations of ambition within the fields of sport, art, and culture, offering them support: financially as well as through network and coaching.