When I first started putting this text together in my head, I thought I had the perfect lens with which to contextualise the practice of the Paris-based Lebanese visual artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri. I thought I could use a slightly twisted popular culture reference to entice you whilst exploring some of the recurring and heavier themes in Cherri’s work through a more light-hearted perspective.

Parce qu’il a grandi en pleine guerre civile, le plasticien libanais Ali Cherri avoue une sensibilité exacerbée à la violence. À découvrir dans deux expositions, en Bretagne et dans la capitale.

Fondazione In Between Art Film is delighted to announce the publication of the first institutional monograph dedicated to the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri. Its aim is to highlight the constellation of ideas, themes, and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects.

L’Institut Giacometti à Paris a donné carte blanche à l’artiste contemporain, né à Beyrouth, Ali Cherri pour dialoguer avec les œuvres du grand sculpteur. Loin des œuvres iconiques de Giacometti : les silhouettes longilignes en bronze comme L’homme qui marche, Ali Cherri s’est intéressé aux œuvres en plâtre. Des têtes principalement qui entrent en résonance avec ses propres créations. Envisagement est le nom de l’exposition.

De la vidéo à la sculpture, la pratique d’Ali Cherri s’apparente à un travail d’archéologue, en ce que ces deux sujets principaux rejoignent les thématiques centrales de la discipline : le territoire et l’objet. C’est justement en étudiant ces données existantes que l’artiste, né au Liban en 1976, tente de déchiffré le passé et reconstituer une histoire fragmentée par le temps, et notamment les conflits et les bouleversements géopolitiques. Élevé dans un pays en pleine guerre civile, le Franco-Libanais s’intéresse depuis aux manières de raconter un récit national et réassembler son patrimoine lorsqu’une nation a justement été détruite, et traumatisée. Si ses sculptures à base de terre, de bois ou de pierre mettent souvent en exergue leurs traces d’usure, devenant ainsi les reliques d’une époque déchue, ses films s’intéressent davantage du rapport de l’être humain à la ruine et aux frontières, sujets qui trouvent à notre époque un écho percutant.

Ce qui est beau dans cette exposition, c’est qu’elle reste mystérieuse, qu’elle pose davantage de questions qu’elle n’apporte de réponses. « Qu’est-ce qu’une tête ? », « Qu’est-ce qu’un visage ? », « Qu’est-ce qu’un personnage ? » A ces interrogations, Ali Cherri apporte peut-être un début d’explications dans une vidéo qu’il a réalisée à la toute fin de la préparation, Retrouver la face, qu’il projette sur un miroir, à la manière de Cocteau, et qui fait se superposer des œuvres de Giacometti et des siennes avec des extraits de films de cinéma mettant en scène la question de l’identité, comme L’Homme sans visage de Franju ou le fameux Blow Job de Warhol. Tout ce qui guide, au fond, le travail de l’artiste – et en particulier la question de l’artefact, du passage d’une réalité à une autre – s’y trouve condensé.

In seinem Werk setzt sich Sammy Baloji mit dem Erbe des Kolonialismus in der Demokratischen Republik Kongo auseinander. Seine beklemmenden Filmcollagen und vielschichtigen Installationen basieren auf Recherchematerial, das der in Belgien lebende Künstler in zahlreichen Archiven Afrikas und Europas aufgespürt hat.

At first it felt blurred. Blurred in the way you might experience a dream. ‘It’ is a largescale video installation, on show in Dreamless Night, curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi. It’s titled The Watchman (all works 2023) and focuses on the life of a young Turkish soldier guarding the border of the unrecognised Turkish Republic ofNorthern Cyprus. We watch as he works his shifts, one after another. Nothing really happens. Until a robin crashes into the guard­house window, deceived by the apparent trans­parency of the glass. A series of notches on the wall indicate that it is not the first to be taken in.

Elles sont nombreuses, les expositions où des fondations et autres institutions muséales invitent un artiste contemporain pour un « face-à-face » ou à « confronter ses œuvres » avec celles de l’un de ses prédécesseurs. Et c’est justement à ce genre de configuration que l’on penserait avoir affaire en apprenant que l’Institut Alberto Giacometti à Paris invite le plasticien et vidéaste libanais Ali Cherri à mettre ses œuvres en dialogue avec celle du sculpteur et peintre suisse, sous le thème à double tranchant de l’Envisagement. Or, ce qui fait d’abord la particularité de cette exposition, comme le signale le commissaire Romain Perrin, c’est le fait d’avoir offert à Cherri « la possibilité d’appréhender les collections et archives mises à sa disposition, ainsi que le lieu où elles sont exposées de manière originale, avec le parcours et la culture qui sont les siens ». Et s’il fallait commencer par la fin, ou en tout cas par une impression qui reste après la visite d’Envisagement, c’est justement celle d’avoir été emporté dans une mise en scène de Ali Cherri, semblable à celles qui sous-tendent ses films. Car même si pour ce travail en particulier, c’est plutôt le pan  « plasticien » de l’œuvre protéiforme de Cherri dont il est question, il n’en demeure pas moins qu’Envisagement nous semble être le film, le court-métrage de la rencontre de ses œuvres et celles de Giacometti.

In the two hours I spend at Sammy Baloji’s studio in Brussels, the table we are sitting at accumulates a small library of books and a Wunderkammer of objects. Every ten minutes, Baloji rises from his chair to search for another visual aid to support the point he is making: from 1970s monographs on the art of the Congo Delta to maps made for mining companies operating in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. At one point, he returns carrying a metal vessel the size of a beer can, the surface of which is covered in a floral relief.

Il porte toute son attention sur cet horizon où rien ne se passe, jusqu’à ce que ce jeune homme se perde dans cet interstice entre le réel et le rêve, un moment où les deux mondes se touchent et où tout devient possible. Alors il s’échappe, invité à suivre une armée fantomatique aux yeux clos, une façon de donner corps à cette éternité qu’il vit et à tous ces soldats morts avant lui.

Die (Kunst)Welt ist zerrissen. Polaritäten, Ausschlüsse, Anfeindungen – all das scheint die Reaktion auf eine globale Krise zu sein, der nicht mit Empathie begegnet werden kann – denn dies würde ein Gegenüber erfordern. Wenn aber dieses Gegenüber (es sind Viele) als Bilder von brutaler Unterdrückung, Militärgewalt und Terror in sozialen Netzwerken existiert; Oder aufgrund von geopolitischer Lage und vermeintlicher religiöser Zugehörigkeit entmenschlicht und delegitimiert wird – dann wird die Mannigfaltigkeit von Empathie unmöglich gemacht. Es entstehen feindselige Lager, die sich gegenseitig reproduzieren.

At first it felt blurred. Blurred in the way you might experience a dream. ‘It’ is a largescale video installation, on show in Dreamless Night, curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi. It’s titled The Watchman (all works 2023) and focuses on the life of a young Turkish-Cypriot soldier guarding the border of the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. We watch as he works his shifts, one after another. Nothing really happens. Until a robin crashes into the guardhouse window, deceived by the apparent transparency of the glass. A series of notches on the wall indicate that it is not the first to be taken in.

Wie sehen Sie die Welt? Was waren die Wendepunkte in Ihrem Leben? Was sind Ihre Träume, Ambitionen und Vorhaben? Kalt erwischt, mag man sich denken, und in der Tat, einfach macht „Unextractable: Sammy Baloji invites“ es den Besuchern der Mainzer Kunsthalle nicht. Die Ausstellung geht uns alle an, sollen uns derlei Fragen sagen. Was selbstredend richtig ist. Man darf sich also durchaus eingeladen fühlen zu dem postkolonialen Diskurs, um den sich hier alles dreht. Lässt man sich auf ihn ein, auf die „Fragen zur Vorbereitung eines Kasala“, die Jean Kabuta dem Betrachter auf dem Weg durch die Kunsthalle mitgibt, ist man auch schon mittendrin. Genau darauf kommt es hier an.

In Cherri’s practice, mud has emerged as a material and a metaphor linking human relationships to their natural surroundings with the space and structures of preservation that emerged in late nineteenth-century Europe as part of imperial and colonial conquest. He draws on the strategies of display central to museological practices to introduce intruders into these revered institutions. Through these interventions, Cherri interrogates how historical—and especially archaeological—objects are created, gaining meaning and value once placed in a museum display case.

In his artistic work Sammy Baloji investigates the history of mining in his home city of Lubumbashi, located in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He contrasts the profound destruction of the environment and social structures to the memories and hopes of people in the Katanga region. Key elements of his artistic practice are to encourage collaboration between art producers, activists, and academics as well as bringing together many different kinds of knowledge and production. His invitation to 12 artists in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Europe with whom he regularly interacts is a continuation of this development of collective structures that he views as a strategy of resistance to extractivism, an economic model in which raw materials are “extracted” from nature.

L’artiste congolais Sammy Baloji n’a pas son pareil pour connecter des histoires sans lien apparent, et il le prouve de nouveau à la galerie Imane Farès, à Paris. A l’entrée, un terrarium renfermant des végétaux du Congo renvoie aux serres portatives qui convoyaient, au XIXe siècle, les plantes indigènes jusqu’aux pays européens. Sa forme alambiquée s’inspire des minerais dont regorge le sous-sol congolais, notamment le cuivre, utilisé dans la fabrication des bombes lors de la première guerre mondiale. Conflit auquel a participé Albert Kudjabo, dont la voix résonne à quelques mètres de là. Ce Congolais fut réquisitionné par l’armée belge avant d’être capturé par les Allemands, qui en firent un objet d’étude. Ainsi se tisse une trame subtile entre la domestication de la nature, au mépris de la biodiversité, la prédation minière et l’asservissement des êtres.

Ali Cherri’s The Watchman [Nöbetçi] (all works 2023) follows a young Turkish Cypriot officer stationed at a watchtower in Akincilar, a district encircled by the meandering border drawn across Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974. Adjacent to the closely patrolled United Nations Buffer Zone, it is a desolate, transitory place where nothing really happens. On the horizon are the crumbling ruins of a village abandoned by Greek Cypriots. When the loudspeaker announces the end of his shift, Sergeant Bulut doesn’t move, his bloodshot eyes staring into the camera as if hypnotized by the drone of cicadas. The soldier’s routine is occasionally interrupted by a robin crashing into the dusty glass, leaving a splotch of blood and feathers; Bulut dutifully retrieves each body and records the collateral casualty with another tick on the wall.

Cherri’s film begins at one of the cataracts of the Nile in the shadow of Sudan’s Merowe Dam, where “toiled a man whose living was made of mud.” Within the dam’s boundary, where the main character Maher works, the surface of the water is placid. Beyond it, the river pounds the colossal man-made structure. Has the monumental dam destroyed a timeless ecosystem? Is it a match for the ferocious Nile? Is the toiling man a match for either?

Sammy Baloji beschäftigt sich mit der Erinnerung und der Geschichte der Demokratischen Republik Kongo und deren Verflechtungen mit Belgien. Baloji untersucht das kulturelle, architektonische und industrielle Erbe der Region Katanga und hinterfragt die Auswirkungen der belgischen Kolonialisierung. Seine Kunst ist jetzt zusammen mit Werken zwölf anderer Künstler*innen in Mainz zu sehen.

In his artistic work Sammy Baloji investigates the history of mining in his home city of Lubumbashi, located in the southeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He contrasts the profound destruction of the environment and social structures to the memories and hopes of people in the Katanga region. Key elements of his artistic practice are to encourage collaboration between art producers, activists, and academics as well as bringing together many different kinds of knowledge and production. His invitation to 12 artists in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Europe with whom he regularly interacts is a continuation of this development of collective structures that he views as a strategy of resistance to extractivism, an economic model in which raw materials are “extracted” from nature.

In his artistic work Sammy Baloji repeatedly addresses the history of mining in and around his native city of Lubumbashi in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He documents how the extractive industries have wreaked extensive destruction on the Katanga region and its social structures, transforming the land into resources and reducing entire societies to a mere pool of potential labourers. He juxtaposes to this harshness the memories, hopes and projects of people who live amidst the ruins of colonialism, industrial mining, and the global capitalist economy.

“I work with imagination as a political strategy and tool for change,” Cherri explains from his studio in the northeastern Parisian suburb of Pantin. “The first thing authoritarian regimes do is to take hold of the space for the imaginary, so a world without them becomes unimaginable.” Against any restraint on imagination or remembering, he crafts work that stems from past realities and blossoms towards alternative futures. “To make a change in the world we live in, we must first be able to imagine a different one,” he affirms.

Der Tod ist mehr als nur das Ende des Lebens«, sagt Ali Cherri und zeigt sein schüchternes Lächeln, als wäre es ihm peinlich, große Worte ge-lassen auszusprechen. Sein Blick wandert auf ein an die Atelierwand ge- heftetes Foto: Marcel Proust auf dem Totenbett. Die Erinnerung an seine im Musée des Beaux-arts von Marseille wachenden Gate-keepers, hybride Wesen aus Natur und Kultur,totemähnliche Mischlinge mit Köpfen ausder Welt der Monster, kommt dem Besucher in den Sinn. Kann man Metaphysik oder Religion auf so etwas Irdisches wie Kunst herunterbrechen? Ali Cherri kann es.

Dressed in loosely fitting black clothes and a denim jacket, Paris-based Lebanese artist Ali Cherri glides through the Oriental Antiquity galleries of the Louvre like a dancer engaged in a complex choreography with the throngs of museum visi- tors around him. We stop before a relief panel depicting the Tree of Life taken from the Palace of King Sargon II at Dur-Sharrukin (c.713–706 BCE). Cherri has been stud- ying this panel for several months in preparation for his forthcoming exhibition at the Giacometti Foundation, Paris, in January. The artist pulls out his phone to show me the progress being made on a 3D interpretation that will be the centrepiece of his show. ‘It is the first time that I will be working in bronze,’ he explains excitedly, swiping past images of the scale plaster model and screenshots of conversations with his chief studio assistant, Valentin Rolovic. Rolovic oversees five other assistants, some of whom I recently observed at the artist’s Paris studio constructing semi-transparent cactus leaves out of resin and massive heads out of styrofoam and fibreglass for ‘Dreamless Night’, an exhibition at Bergamo’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, which opened in early October.

Lebanese artist and film-maker Ali Cherri, artist-in-residence at London’s National Gallery in 2021, makes his feature film debut with a visually striking, ruminative and mysterious piece of work, a kind of magic social realist vision. The script was developed with two French cinema heavyweights, producer and screenwriter Geoffroy Grison and director Bertrand Bonello and it premiered at Cannes in 2022 in the Directors’ Fortnight section.

It is a drama teetering on the verge of a heatstroke hallucination, with flourishes of violence. The setting is the hydroelectric Merowe dam in northern Sudan on the Nile; it’s 2019, and President Omar al-Bashir is about to be deposed by the army after months of protests. Maher (Maher El Khair) is working by the riverbank making bricks in the burning sun, for a foreman who is always liable to dock people’s pay. Listlessly succumbing to a kind of metaphysical torpor, Maher listens to news reports about the revolution’s gathering momentum and every evening he goes off to build a strange pagan statue, something like a Wicker Man for the Arab spring, which appears to be having a life of its own. Meanwhile, Maher is developing his own alarming physical symptoms: a wound that may be the entry point for a supernatural intelligence introducing Maher to new ideas.

Cherri has a marvellous visual and compositional sense, often creating startling images in the desert plains, which look like Tatooine. And the dam itself? An image of the government’s doomed attempt to stem the tide of revolution? Perhaps. It’s interesting work, though perhaps it fetishises Maher’s enigmatic silence a little too much.

‘The Milk of Dreams’ at the Arsenale opens with Simone Leigh’s huge bronze bust of a woman’s head and torso, Brick House (2019) – a work that, shown alongside enigmatic figurative paintings by the Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón, announces this exhibition’s emphasis on painting and sculpture, as well as its thematic love of the mythic, the monumental and the mysterious. ‘The Milk of Dreams’ – boasting more than 200 artists from 58 countries, the majority of whom are female or gender non-conforming – derives its title from a short story by Leonora Carrington, whose surreal paintings of dreamy interiors and ecstatic landscapes are also included here and serve as a sort of precis. In her curatorial statement, artistic director Cecilia Alemani claims that ‘many artists are imagining a posthuman condition that challenges the modern Western vision of the human being – especially the presumed universal ideal of the white, male “Man of Reason” – as fixed centre of the universe and measure of all things’. Thankfully, many of the works slip out from the confines of the show’s somewhat academic remit, offering a nuanced perspective that, at times, transfixed me.

At the heart of Sammy Baloji’s exhibition “K(C)ongo Fragments of Interlaced Dialogues. Subversive Classifications” were four exquisitely carved ivory oliphants, or hunting horns, from the Kingdom of Kongo. Two of these carvings belonged to Florentine banker and arts patron Cosimo I de’ Medici. Among this show’s many facets was a set of variations on the interlocking geometric patterns that adorned prized possessions such as oliphants, which the newly baptized rulers of Kongo gave to their European counterparts and the papacy as part of diplomatic exchanges. Similar designs were featured on cushions and carpets woven out of raffia palm fibers, so fine as to recall the texture of velvet, which testify to stylistic cross-influences between West Africa and Europe during the Renaissance and beyond. Based between Brussels and his native Democratic Republic of Congo, Baloji appropriated these motifs in a weaving presented on a wooden loom, Goods Trades Roots, 2020, as well as in the series of copper and bronze “Negatives of Luxury Cloths,” 2017–, and The Crossing, 2022, a nearly three-hundred-foot-long crimson carpet that elegantly linked the six communicating gallery spaces of the Andito degli Angiolini, the Medicean residence of the Palazzo Pitti.

Lauréat d’un prestigieux Lion d’argent à la Biennale de Venise, Ali Cherri a également fait sensation au Festival de Cannes avec son premier long-métrage, Le Barrage. L’artiste d’origine libanaise multiplie par ailleurs ses travaux sur les collections des institutions muséales pour en révéler les logiques colonialistes ou d’exclusion. Numéro art l’a suivi dans les réserves des musées des Beaux-Arts et d’Histoire naturelle de Marseille qui lui ont inspiré de récentes expositions.

This experience also raised the question of our faith in the museum. We cannot see what’s inside these boxes but we trust that what it is telling us is true. This is how I started looking at the politics of visibility: what the museum as an institution allows us to see or not to see. Museography is always a political question, including how the museum is lit and how certain artworks remain in storage, never coming out to the light to be made visible. Museums are also beginning to monetize attention. More and more institutions carry out crowd-funding to restore, preserve, and buy paintings. If people spend more time in front of a certain painting, they decide this is the work they want to restore. All of this affects the lives of certain artworks.

An exhibition inspired by the vandalism of five paintings while they were being displayed has opened at the National Gallery, in an attempt to explore how trauma can manifest itself in people’s response to museum and gallery collections.

Dans l’exposition qu’il présente chez Imane Farès, donc, sous le titre de Madad, un mot arabe difficilement traduisible, mais qui est lié au soufisme et désigne une lumière qui s’apparente à la notion d’aura, on trouve de nombreuses maisons. Une, en résine replie de paillettes dorées qui, sous l’effet de la lumière, reproduisent les couleurs du spectre, est associée à une vidéo hypnotique où l’on a le sentiment de s’approcher du soleil (« Nôr-Manzil-Nôr »). Une autre, complètement transparente et construite sur plusieurs niveaux, fascine par sa pureté et sa forme parfaite (« Manzil-Maqâm »). Une autre est accrochée en hauteur et les paillettes qui sont à l’intérieur forment le dessin d’une flamme (« Manzil-Fatîl »). Une autre encore est placée au sommet de sept récipients en cuivre martelé posés les uns sur les autres, tandis que son pendant est au centre des sept mêmes récipients, mais au même niveau, imbriqués les uns dans les autres (« Manzil-Hawd / Manzil-Jabal »). Et d’autres enfin sont dessinées sur des papiers qui reproduisent eux aussi la couleur du spectre et avec un crayon de la même couleur que le papier (« Tayf-Lawn »).

Sinzo Aanza a la force tranquille de ceux qui n’ont pas reçu la rage en héritage. Depuis cinq ans pourtant, l’artiste, qui manie aussi bien la photo que la plume, forge un « Mémorial improbable », inspiré des cimetières numériques japonais, pour honorer les victimes de l’exploitation minière au Congo, tombées sous les coups des colons et, plus tard, d’un Etat kleptomane et d’autres pays prédateurs.

Ali Cherri’s eye-catching works on paper, prints, and installations highlight the process of excavation and the relocation of artifacts from his native Lebanon to museums. Made primarily from archaeological relics and sites, the artist’s works invite the viewer to rethink the classification and collection of those objects from historical ruins—especially during times of geopolitical disasters. This past April, Cherri became an artist in residence at the National Gallery in London, in collaboration with the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum. Later this year, works by the artist completed during the residency will be exhibited at the gallery in a solo presentation.

The fact that none of this context is mentioned in the Hôtel de la Marine’s audio guide (or anywhere in the room itself) is jarring to say the least, especially given the building’s history and current status as a site of public education, maritime research, and remembrance. No guidebooks or articles about the Hôtel de la Marine seem to mention it either, noting only that these hangings (which did not actually reside in this room during the eighteenth century) were added because they fit the dimensions of the space. This absence contrasts sharply with Sammy Baloji’s one-room show across the Seine, where versions of the same two tapestries were displayed alongside other examples from the “New Indies” and the artist’s own work, and where the themes of slavery, colonialism, and Congolese heritage were emphasized. Known for his archivally driven installations that explore history and memory in Congo, under Belgian rule from 1908 to 1960, Baloji has said that he is “not interested in colonialism as a thing of the past, but in the continuation of that system.” That interest was on full view in his exhibition, which fused time periods, cultures, media, and materials to explore the unacknowledged debt that history and modernity owe to African sources and bodies.

In an essay she wrote to accompany the Beaux-Arts show, Anne Lafont notes how Baloji “interweave[s] time, media, and artworks” so that we might “see and rethink our relationship to art objects and to history.” On some level, this aim resonates with the Hôtel de la Marine’s mission to bring visitors “on an all-round trip through time,” to “breathe life into the various areas” of the building, and to “expand [a visitor’s] knowledge of history.” And yet the Marine has opted for a particular and partial view of history, one that trades on a myth of the manifold glories and pleasures of the ancien régime without acknowledging the forced labor and suffering that enabled its “worldly” elite society to “flourish.” Perhaps the choice to create a “mini-Versailles” in Paris was driven by revenue concerns, but it would seem to underestimate (if not outright offend) visitors to assume that they could not hear multiple sides of the story, or could not break their “immersive” reverie to learn more about the objects and subjects depicted and their role in shaping the history to which the museum is dedicated.

On connaissait l’artiste nigérian pour ses fabuleuses installations sonores, ravivant le vacarme de Lagos, où s’entrechoquent les cris des marchands de rue, les klaxons impatients, et le barouf interminable des fêtes. Si le son domine toujours son exposition, « Stirring the pot », à la Friche la Belle de Mai, à Marseille, le Nigérian convoque les autres sens, notamment l’odorat, en disséminant des effluves de terre mouillée et d’épices.

How does one make a film from within the advancing rot of occupation and its ceaseless, collective catastrophe? How can such a hegemonic background be dealt with—what possibilities might move in the spectrum between the fixed poles of utter denial and direct resistance? “For a Free Palestine,” an online program of works by Palestinian women assembled by Daniella Shreir for Another Screen (the programming arm of the feminist journal Another Gaze), is an attempt at some answers. Those answers variously flicker through these works from disparate times, localities, and sensibilities.

Whether for its rubber, its copper, its uranium, its coltan, or its lithium, the Congo has seen and continues to see its earth continuously looted by European colonial powers. For the last 16 years, Sammy Baloji has been dedicating his artistic practice to the literal and historic stratas his research has led him to excavate. Caroline Honorien and Léopold Lambert talked with him about what decolonization would signify in this context.

Dans son exposition «Kasala : the Slaughterhouse of Dreams or the First Human, Bende’s Error», à la Galerie Imane Farès, à Paris, Baloji travaille par associations et juxtapositions d’images. Sur des miroirs, il appose des photos de Himmelheber et des rendus de scanner à rayons X d’objets de sa collection, technique fréquemment utilisée par les musées pour visualiser leur structure et d’éventuels contenus cachés. Le procédé leur donne l’air d’être des pierres d’autant plus précieuses qu’elles pulsent d’une lumière intérieure rose, rappelant ces autres minerais convoités issus des mines du sud du Congo.

A Lubumbashi, où Sammy Baloji est né en 1978 dans une famille de commerçants, la vie tournait déjà autour de l’extraction du cuivre. Le jeune homme se souvient de la cheminée fumante de la Gécamines, la société administrant les mines depuis l’époque coloniale, et des sirènes qui scandaient le quotidien laborieux de la ville. Il n’a pas oublié non plus les violences du début des années 1990, quand le président autocrate du Zaïre, Mobutu Sese Seko, sent son pouvoir vaciller. Lors du massacre des étudiants sur le campus de l’université de Lubumbashi, Sammy Baloji a 12 ans. Emeutes, pillages et xénophobie : la crise rattrape les Luba du Kasaï, l’ethnie dont est issue la famille Baloji, qui perd alors tous ses biens. « Tout ce que je fais aujourd’hui trouve ses racines dans cette expérience violente de devoir renier l’ethnie d’où je viens », rapporte-t-il avec pudeur.

James Webb’s video installation Three Dreams Of The Sinking World is ripe with overt and subtle allusions to Kubrick’s film, transposing its setting to the Carlton Hotel in downtown Johannesburg. Rather than the American roaring twenties, the ghosts which haunt the corridors and leisure rooms of the Carlton Hotel are tied to another moment of unabashed class consciousness: the height of apartheid’s decadence and global ambition during the 1970s.

La presenza di Sammy Baloji (Lubumbashi, 1978) a Roma per una residenza all’Accademia di Francia ‒ Villa Medici è stata l’occasione per conoscere e intervistare uno dei più interessanti artisti che lavorano fra Africa e Europa. Sammy Baloji è nato a Lubumbashi, Repubblica Democratica del Congo, dove ha studiato letteratura e studi umanistici. Dopo la laurea ha cominciato a lavorare sulle arti visive come disegnatore di comics, poi ha focalizzato la propria ricerca su fotografia e videoarte. I temi ricorrenti nel suo lavoro sono la storia del colonialismo, lo sfruttamento etnografico, l’urbanistica e l’architettura. Attraversa i linguaggi nell’arco di una ricerca continua e ha partecipato a due Biennali di Venezia, alla Biennale di Dakar e a molte altre mostre in Europa (l’ultima in ordine di tempo: Congo as Fiction al Museo Rietberg di Zurigo), Africa e Stati Uniti.

Basma Alsharif’s exhibition here centers around A Philistine (2019), a novella written by the artist that tracks a train journey down the historic Haifa–Beirut–Tripoli line that moves backwards through history at each stop. In the middle of the main gallery, a public reading space offers visitors the opportunity to situate themselves within this narrative of transience. A Philistine includes historic images of pre-1948 Palestine taken from the Library of Congress; these are also displayed on the walls surrounding the miniature library. Alsharif, herself a member of the Palestinian diaspora, has intervened in these photographs, adding Baldessarian black and white circles to block out facial features and places, effectively rendering these highly detailed images siteless.

This past September, the Art Institute of Chicago gave James Webb’s project, Prayer, its North American debut. Prayer was first exhibited in Webb’s home city of Cape Town in 2000 and has since traveled internationally. This latest installment is the tenth. Willing residents of each host city contribute to the project by letting Webb record their prayers, which represent a variety of faith traditions.

There’s a wry sense of irony that sits somewhat uncomfortably with Webb’s genuine absorption and enjoyment of the occult and mysterious. Perhaps it’s their contrast with his near-mathematically minimalist presentation. Interestingly the realms of Physics and Maths have long been dogged by associations with the occult due to Johann Zöllner’s ‘Transcendental Physics’, a text in which he used the idea of a fourth dimension as a way of explaining the impressive illusions of magician and charlatan Henry Slade in 1879. This example serves to emphasize just how much of our intellectual (as well as emotional) endeavour is abstract and ephemeral. Some (if not all) numbers are imaginary.

Here, TLmag presents a conversation between Lebanese artist and designer Ali Cherri and professor and the director of International relations of the DAI in Berlin, Friedrich Lüth.

«J’ai habité au Caire, au Liban, en Jordanie, à Paris, à Los Angeles et actuellement je réside à Berlin. Ma pratique correspond à ma façon d’être en tant que palestinienne : la conscience d’une oppression permanente, et la nécessité d’évoluer ailleurs. D’ailleurs, c’est une expérience assez universelle et profondément humaine, qui se rattache à de nombreuses histoires du présent et du passé. Dans mon travail, l’idée de se connecter à d’autres endroits et d’autres narrations est essentielle », poursuit Basma al-Sharif, qui a initialement une formation de photographe.

Basma Alsharif, born in Kuwait and raised in France and U.S., is based in Cairo at present, and her exhibition presents the ways in which she comes to terms with her
status as a member of the Palestinian diaspora. The title of one of her installations, Trompe l’Oeil, which transfers the artist’s living room in California to SALT Galata’s first floor, explicitly speaks for the whole exhibition with its allusions to the construction of reality. The work, composed of furniture pieces, wall murals and a video, provides the viewer with glimpses of the artist’s daily life activities, as well as the historical context with regards to her diasporic existence as a Palestinian living abroad. While the video presents the artist engaged in her daily life—cooking, caressing her partner, working on archival images—the murals depicting her living room feature details, through which the viewer is encouraged to confront the colonial past of the Middle East, embodied in three photographs hung on the wall and taken from the archive of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), a crucial figure in the history of West’s interference in the region. The introductory text of the exhibition specifically draws attention to Alsharif’s use of these images without permission, a detail echoing the artist’s search for a narrative outside the officially acknowledged accounts of the events that led to the dispersion of Palestinians around the world.

Le Congo constitue bien une réalité. Complexe par ailleurs. Les changements de noms de l’ancienne colonie belge illustrent bien ces flottements. On a connu la République de Congo-Léopoldville, puis la République démocratique du Congo. Ensuite, dans un désir d’africanisation, ce fut le Zaïre. Depuis 1997, alors que le pays n’en finit pas de connaître des soubresauts depuis son indépendance mouvementée de1960, l’État est revenu aux termes de République démocratique du Congo. Avouez qu’il est permis de s’y perdre, d’autant plus qu’il y a les vicissitudes parallèles de l’ancien domaine français, l’actuel Congo-Brazzaville !

« En commençant à travailler sur les images, j’ai été frappé par l’effacement de l’histoire. […] Mon travail consiste justement à reprendre le processus d’effacement et à rétablir des connexions défaites. Il se situe aussi bien dans la dissection des couches d’oubli, dans un intérêt pour la méthodologie de la disparition, que dans le rétablissement de liens »

A peine le visiteur a-t-il franchi la porte ouvrant sur Fiction Congo, au musée Rietberg, qu’il se retrouve en plein coeur du sujet.
Face à lui, une projection d’images en noir et blanc qui interpellent. Il s’agit d’archives documentant le périple de l’ethnologue
allemand Hans Himmelheber (1908 – 2003). Cette expédition qui s’est déroulée à cheval sur les années 1938 et 1939 fournit la
matière première d’une exposition ayant pour ambition de congédier, ou à tout le moins de mettre en perspective, les habituels
sous- entendus idéologiques entourant la mise en évidence du patrimoine artistique congolais sous nos latitudes. Les clichés
pris sur le vif qui déblent sur l’écran décrivent ce que l’on appelle pudiquement une  » collecte d’objets « , révélant de manière
explicite les coulisses d’une telle entreprise de prédation.

A Philistine’s time-tripping, border-dissolving narrative follows the route of colonial-era train lines that have been lost to conflict. Often playful and humorous, at other times mystical and troubling, the book’s representation of the Palestinian experience of displacement seems to alternate between an absence of hope—the inevitability of more violence and injustice—and a knowingly naive belief in better days to come. This emotional and political ambiguity both recognizes and resists the Palestinian tragedy while also refusing to be confined by it. It’s an approach that looks for contradiction and complexity in people and their situations.

Et plus encore le goût dans une installation vidéo intitulée Migratory Notes, retraçant la circulation des denrées et des saveurs, de leur collecte au Ghana ou au Cameroun à leur arrivée à Marseille, et leur transformation par une cheffe africaine chevronnée.

The noise instantly returned me to Lagos, home to twenty-one million people (myself included) who are always on the move, negotiating, thriving, and suffering in a city the size of which seems insufficient to contain all the life there. I could hear the familiar sounds of chart-topping music blasting from mobile speakers; the radio jingles for wonder drugs that cure cancer and aids; the voice of a vendor soliciting customers to buy her dried fish. Most of all, I heard the distinct growls of the city’s famous yellow-and-black buses—the danfos— and their conductors shouting out destinations

La question du déplacement le hante d’ailleurs depuis 2010. A chacun de ses voyages, il transporte sept petites pierres provenant du Rif, qu’il abandonne à l’étranger. Il prélève alors sept autres cailloux qu’il vient déposer à son retour au Rif. De cette performance pour le moment informelle, il conserve dessins et photos, matrices pour une future œuvre.

Enfant, Younès Rahmoun s’est rêvé grand voyageur, façon Sinbad ou Ibn Battuta. Il n’a pas pour autant la tentation de l’exil. C’est à Tétouan, dans une maison traditionnelle de la médina avec vue sur la caserne militaire, qu’il se ressource toujours. C’est là qu’il a cofondé la résidence d’artistes Trankat en 2013. « Le paradis est à portée de main, dit-il. Chez moi, dans ma ville, dans mon quartier. » La sagesse, comme la valeur, n’attend pas le nombre des années.