The Venice Art Biennial started with a preview last week and is now open to the public until November 24, 2024. The art crowd was buzzing through the city, in the Giardini and in the Arsenale…

The Olympiad delle belle arti with 87 National Pavilions and the central show titled “Foreigners Everywhere”, curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa gathered ca. 300 artists from all over the world – mainly from the peripheries, more than half of them no longer alive, outsiders, non-mainstream, indigenous to their countries, queer, non-white, non-western... Most of them work at the roots of culture, anthropologically: many question the western canon of aesthetics by working with crafts that are at the origin of visual arts.

Mounira al Solh represents Lebanon. In the pavilion, located in the Arsenale, Al Solh goes back to her ancestors, the Phoenicians, who left the Lebanese shores in the seventh century BC. They navigated the Mediterranean to conquer Europe, which was named after their goddess Europa. Al Solh's multimedial pavilion uses sculpture, ceramics, film and painting to tell the Hi-Story from a feminist perspective.

'Through an impressive range of 41 pieces, including sculptures, drawings, paintings, embroidery, and video, Al Solh focuses on the ancient Phoenician character of Europa and rewrites her narrative of domination by reimagining her as a powerful protagonist.'