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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

“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.

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.

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.

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.