In Mounira Al Solh’s world, myth is not fixed in marble — it’s soft, unstable, and alive inside bodies, bedrooms and boats. Opening the 2026 programme at Arnolfini A Land as Big as Her Skin (28 February – 24 May 2026) brings together her acclaimed Venice Biennale installation A Dance with Her Myth with new works that collapse the distance between ancient legend and modern life.
First shown at the 2024 Biennale, A Dance with Her Myth retells the story of the Phoenician Princess Europa and the Greek god Zeus through a life-size boat skeleton, film, drawings, paintings and masks. Transformation, abduction and power are stripped of spectacle and reframed through movement, migration and survival. The myth becomes political — and deeply bodily.
New works Elissa’s Room and Europa’s Bedroom shift history into intimate space. These imagined interiors give legendary women privacy, vulnerability and interior life — pulling queens and symbols back into human scale. Monumentality dissolves. What remains is softness, tension and quiet resistance.
Born in Beirut in 1978 and now living between Lebanon and the Netherlands, Al Solh works across drawing, textiles, film, painting and sculpture. Her practice drifts between folklore and politics, humour and trauma, personal memory and collective history. Lightness, for her, is not escape — it is defiance.
The title A Land as Big as Her Skin frames the body as contested territory, identity as something both fragile and vast. Al Solh doesn’t just revisit myth — she domesticates it, queers it, and lets it breathe again.
Organised in collaboration with Bonnefanten, with support from the Mondriaan Fund and Ammodo Art.
