My Favourite Hour is a Night Hour: Al Fahma من الشُّروق إلى الفَحمة

performance presented in collaboration with musician Jana Saleh

My Favourite Hour is a Night Hour: Al Fahma

Written and Performed by Mounira Al Solh

Music created and played by Jana Saleh

First presented at "Position V", during my solo exhibition at the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands in 2019

Images are from the second performance iteration at Wiels, in Brussles, in the framework of the exhbition "Risquons-Tout" , October 2020

Circa 30 minutes performance

Research for the hours of the days in Arabic are resulting from fruitful dialogues with Jacques Aswad, based on earlier collaborative making and readings from “NOA - Not Only Arabic” Magazine, issue #3, "on words, prejudice, schizophrenia and enta omri” initiated by M Al Solh with guest editor Jacques Aswad, during Home Works VII in Beirut.

Thanks for the Lebanon Studio Assistants, embroiderers and assistants for producing the tent:

Sitt Souad el Bitar, Sitt Noura Matar, Sitt Houda Wahab, Zeina Chakkour, Louise Boutan, Lea Chikhani, Sabine Chaabane, Abu Sakhra, Salam Shokor, Jihad Shokor, David Badawi, and Balsam Bouzzour.

Props:

Self-made Tent, sheet, overhead projector, projected texts, base guitarre, amplifyers, speakers

The public is outside the tent, and can only see the shadows of my projections, and hear my voice and the playing and sound inteventions of Jana, that guide the rythm of the performance and give the needed impact next to speech.

The performance is a text I wrote based on my simple and quotidian interpretations of the names of the hours in Arabic, and connecting them to what is happening today, to ideas of women thay are not coming from the Western position, yet at times inspired from women's positions in the West and aware of them. These hours of the day and night in Arabic are 24 names, compiled by Al Thaalibi. I have included and embroidered those hours in my work. Whilst reflecting on time and the female body, the 27 days of cycle the body goes through, transformations that the body goes through in chuncks of decades and time.

Ideas of cleaningness are also intertwined, based on how my grandmothre prayed 5 times a day, each time to a different hour of the day/night, and connecting herself strongly to the sky, to the moon, to the movement of the stars and the planets.

Questions of women's positions whilst welcoming men to join the circle for liberation of all humans from patriarchal oppressiveness is liturgically at play. Thus I sing, I dance, I speak to evoke what is at stake.