In the series HMKV Video of the Month, HMKV presents current video works by international artists for the duration of one month each – selected by Inke Arns.
Mounira Al Solh: NOW EAT MY SCRIPT
HMKV Video of the Month
On view 1 – 30 September 2015
It all started with the story of an aunt smuggling a sacrificial lamb across the Syrian-Lebanese border in the boot of her car.
“It seems we kill the intimate moment of death each time we record it,” observes the silent narrator of Mounira Al Solh's Now Eat My Script, a video that ruminates on representations of violence in the context of Syria's civil war.
Twenty-five years after the end of its civil war, Lebanon has become a refuge for more than a million Syrians fleeing civil war in their country. By the end of 2014 Syrian refugees are expected to make up a third of Lebanon’s population. Already home to nearly 500,000 Palestinian refugees, Lebanon now has the highest population of refugees (in proportion to its total population) of any nation in the world.
In her video Now Eat My Script (2014) Mounira Al Solh enquires about habits and languages of refugees and immigrants in their new countries. Al Solh takes the transit of a sacrificed lamb in the trunk of her relative's car as a starting point to reflect on the exchange of goods and food between her mother's family in Syria and her family in Lebanon during periods of conflict. The movement between families becomes a way of questioning the possibility of communicating trauma.