February 8, 2018–April 29, 2018
Galleries 182–84

The ongoing drawing and embroidery series I strongly believe in our right to be frivolousby Mounira Al Solh (born 1978) collects histories and personal experiences that continue to emerge from the humanitarian and political crises in Syria and the Middle East.

Born in Beirut to a Lebanese father and Syrian mother, Al Solh started the series in 2011, shortly after the civil uprising in Syria, and continues to the present-day Syrian civil war. The project documents deeply personal encounters and conversations between the artist and Syrian refugees as well as other people from the Middle East who were forcibly displaced to Lebanon, Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world. The oral histories of displaced individuals to which Al Solh bears witness are as much administrative accounts as personal ones: many of the portraits are drawn on yellow legal paper, a material index of the painstaking bureaucratic processes immigrants go through in order to obtain citizenship.

Mounira Al Solh. I strongly believe in our right to be frivolous, 2012–ongoing. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut / Hamburg.