Ali Cherri

The Adoration of the Golden Calf after Poussin, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a bas-relief pedestal in jesmonite, wood and gold leaf, and an eight-legged two-headed taxidermy lamb.
188 x 137,5 x 63,5 cm (display case) | 100 x 45 x 50 cm (bas-relief pedestal) | 43 x 44 x 32 cm (taxidermy lamb)
Unique

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) after Leonardo, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a cardbaord rendition of a bullet damage, newspapers, a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a sculpture comprised of glass eyes and a metal stand.
220 x 170 x 70 cm (display case) | 70 x 7 cm (cardboard)
Unique

The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) after Vélazquez, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a 19th-century head carving in marble, a wooden reclining Venus sculpture, a mirror and red velvet fabric.
200 x 220 x 80 cm (display case) | 40 x 30 x 30 cm (marble head) | 170 x 80 x 80 cm (wooden Venus)
Unique

Self Portrait at the Age of 63 after Rembrandt, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing the sculpture of Rembrandt’s head in wax and a metal frame.
166,4 x 127 x 53,3 cm (display case)
Unique

The Madonna of the Cat (‘La Madonna del Gatto’) after Baroccio, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a taxidermy goldfinch and a porcelain hand.
147,5 x 81,2 x 40,5 cm (display case) | 12 x 10 x 7 cm (goldfinch) | 12 x 37 x 37 cm (porcelain hand)
Unique

Photos © The National Gallery, London, 2022

Ali Cherri presents work that considers how histories of trauma can be explored through a response to museum and gallery collections. This exhibition, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ introduces cabinets of curiosity into the heart of the Sainsbury Wing, containing assembled fragments that might look like relics from another collection.

Starting with research in the National Gallery’s archive, Cherri uncovered accounts of five paintings that were vandalised while on display. He was struck by the public’s highly emotional response to these attacks, finding that newspaper articles would describe the damages as if they were wounds inflicted on a living being – even referring to the Gallery’s conservators as surgeons. He also noticed an overwhelming urge to ‘heal’, make good and hide the damage. This personification of artworks, and the suggestion that they can experience distress, is reflected in the exhibition’s title, taken from Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’. In response, Cherri presents a series of mixed media, sculptural installations that recall aspects of each painting and that imagine its life following the vandalism. They bring into question what Cherri calls the ‘politics of visibility’; the decisions we make about how, and to what extent, we accept trauma within museums. By translating each damaged work into a series of strange objects, Cherri reminds us that we are never truly the same after experiencing violence. Assembled in five old-fashioned vitrines reminiscent of early museum displays and cabinets of curiosity, lined up in the Sainsbury Wing and surrounded by Renaissance paintings that often show wounds and suffering, Cherri’s installations resonate with sympathy.

The Adoration of the Golden Calf after Poussin, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a bas-relief pedestal in jesmonite, wood and gold leaf, and an eight-legged two-headed taxidermy lamb.
188 x 137,5 x 63,5 cm (display case) | 100 x 45 x 50 cm (bas-relief pedestal) | 43 x 44 x 32 cm (taxidermy lamb)
Unique

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) after Leonardo, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a cardbaord rendition of a bullet damage, newspapers, a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a sculpture comprised of glass eyes and a metal stand.
220 x 170 x 70 cm (display case) | 70 x 7 cm (cardboard)
Unique

The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) after Vélazquez, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a 19th-century head carving in marble, a wooden reclining Venus sculpture, a mirror and red velvet fabric.
200 x 220 x 80 cm (display case) | 40 x 30 x 30 cm (marble head) | 170 x 80 x 80 cm (wooden Venus)
Unique

Self Portrait at the Age of 63 after Rembrandt, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing the sculpture of Rembrandt’s head in wax and a metal frame.
166,4 x 127 x 53,3 cm (display case)
Unique

The Madonna of the Cat (‘La Madonna del Gatto’) after Baroccio, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a taxidermy goldfinch and a porcelain hand.
147,5 x 81,2 x 40,5 cm (display case) | 12 x 10 x 7 cm (goldfinch) | 12 x 37 x 37 cm (porcelain hand)
Unique

Photos © The National Gallery, London, 2022

Ali Cherri presents work that considers how histories of trauma can be explored through a response to museum and gallery collections. This exhibition, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ introduces cabinets of curiosity into the heart of the Sainsbury Wing, containing assembled fragments that might look like relics from another collection.

Starting with research in the National Gallery’s archive, Cherri uncovered accounts of five paintings that were vandalised while on display. He was struck by the public’s highly emotional response to these attacks, finding that newspaper articles would describe the damages as if they were wounds inflicted on a living being – even referring to the Gallery’s conservators as surgeons. He also noticed an overwhelming urge to ‘heal’, make good and hide the damage. This personification of artworks, and the suggestion that they can experience distress, is reflected in the exhibition’s title, taken from Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’. In response, Cherri presents a series of mixed media, sculptural installations that recall aspects of each painting and that imagine its life following the vandalism. They bring into question what Cherri calls the ‘politics of visibility’; the decisions we make about how, and to what extent, we accept trauma within museums. By translating each damaged work into a series of strange objects, Cherri reminds us that we are never truly the same after experiencing violence. Assembled in five old-fashioned vitrines reminiscent of early museum displays and cabinets of curiosity, lined up in the Sainsbury Wing and surrounded by Renaissance paintings that often show wounds and suffering, Cherri’s installations resonate with sympathy.

The Adoration of the Golden Calf after Poussin, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a bas-relief pedestal in jesmonite, wood and gold leaf, and an eight-legged two-headed taxidermy lamb.
188 x 137,5 x 63,5 cm (display case) | 100 x 45 x 50 cm (bas-relief pedestal) | 43 x 44 x 32 cm (taxidermy lamb)
Unique

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) after Leonardo, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a cardbaord rendition of a bullet damage, newspapers, a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a sculpture comprised of glass eyes and a metal stand.
220 x 170 x 70 cm (display case) | 70 x 7 cm (cardboard)
Unique

The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) after Vélazquez, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a 19th-century head carving in marble, a wooden reclining Venus sculpture, a mirror and red velvet fabric.
200 x 220 x 80 cm (display case) | 40 x 30 x 30 cm (marble head) | 170 x 80 x 80 cm (wooden Venus)
Unique

Self Portrait at the Age of 63 after Rembrandt, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing the sculpture of Rembrandt’s head in wax and a metal frame.
166,4 x 127 x 53,3 cm (display case)
Unique

The Madonna of the Cat (‘La Madonna del Gatto’) after Baroccio, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a taxidermy goldfinch and a porcelain hand.
147,5 x 81,2 x 40,5 cm (display case) | 12 x 10 x 7 cm (goldfinch) | 12 x 37 x 37 cm (porcelain hand)
Unique

Photos © The National Gallery, London, 2022

Ali Cherri presents work that considers how histories of trauma can be explored through a response to museum and gallery collections. This exhibition, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ introduces cabinets of curiosity into the heart of the Sainsbury Wing, containing assembled fragments that might look like relics from another collection.

Starting with research in the National Gallery’s archive, Cherri uncovered accounts of five paintings that were vandalised while on display. He was struck by the public’s highly emotional response to these attacks, finding that newspaper articles would describe the damages as if they were wounds inflicted on a living being – even referring to the Gallery’s conservators as surgeons. He also noticed an overwhelming urge to ‘heal’, make good and hide the damage. This personification of artworks, and the suggestion that they can experience distress, is reflected in the exhibition’s title, taken from Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’. In response, Cherri presents a series of mixed media, sculptural installations that recall aspects of each painting and that imagine its life following the vandalism. They bring into question what Cherri calls the ‘politics of visibility’; the decisions we make about how, and to what extent, we accept trauma within museums. By translating each damaged work into a series of strange objects, Cherri reminds us that we are never truly the same after experiencing violence. Assembled in five old-fashioned vitrines reminiscent of early museum displays and cabinets of curiosity, lined up in the Sainsbury Wing and surrounded by Renaissance paintings that often show wounds and suffering, Cherri’s installations resonate with sympathy.

The Adoration of the Golden Calf after Poussin, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a bas-relief pedestal in jesmonite, wood and gold leaf, and an eight-legged two-headed taxidermy lamb.
188 x 137,5 x 63,5 cm (display case) | 100 x 45 x 50 cm (bas-relief pedestal) | 43 x 44 x 32 cm (taxidermy lamb)
Unique

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) after Leonardo, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a cardbaord rendition of a bullet damage, newspapers, a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a sculpture comprised of glass eyes and a metal stand.
220 x 170 x 70 cm (display case) | 70 x 7 cm (cardboard)
Unique

The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) after Vélazquez, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a 19th-century head carving in marble, a wooden reclining Venus sculpture, a mirror and red velvet fabric.
200 x 220 x 80 cm (display case) | 40 x 30 x 30 cm (marble head) | 170 x 80 x 80 cm (wooden Venus)
Unique

Self Portrait at the Age of 63 after Rembrandt, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing the sculpture of Rembrandt’s head in wax and a metal frame.
166,4 x 127 x 53,3 cm (display case)
Unique

The Madonna of the Cat (‘La Madonna del Gatto’) after Baroccio, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a taxidermy goldfinch and a porcelain hand.
147,5 x 81,2 x 40,5 cm (display case) | 12 x 10 x 7 cm (goldfinch) | 12 x 37 x 37 cm (porcelain hand)
Unique

Photos © The National Gallery, London, 2022

Ali Cherri presents work that considers how histories of trauma can be explored through a response to museum and gallery collections. This exhibition, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ introduces cabinets of curiosity into the heart of the Sainsbury Wing, containing assembled fragments that might look like relics from another collection.

Starting with research in the National Gallery’s archive, Cherri uncovered accounts of five paintings that were vandalised while on display. He was struck by the public’s highly emotional response to these attacks, finding that newspaper articles would describe the damages as if they were wounds inflicted on a living being – even referring to the Gallery’s conservators as surgeons. He also noticed an overwhelming urge to ‘heal’, make good and hide the damage. This personification of artworks, and the suggestion that they can experience distress, is reflected in the exhibition’s title, taken from Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’. In response, Cherri presents a series of mixed media, sculptural installations that recall aspects of each painting and that imagine its life following the vandalism. They bring into question what Cherri calls the ‘politics of visibility’; the decisions we make about how, and to what extent, we accept trauma within museums. By translating each damaged work into a series of strange objects, Cherri reminds us that we are never truly the same after experiencing violence. Assembled in five old-fashioned vitrines reminiscent of early museum displays and cabinets of curiosity, lined up in the Sainsbury Wing and surrounded by Renaissance paintings that often show wounds and suffering, Cherri’s installations resonate with sympathy.

The Adoration of the Golden Calf after Poussin, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a bas-relief pedestal in jesmonite, wood and gold leaf, and an eight-legged two-headed taxidermy lamb.
188 x 137,5 x 63,5 cm (display case) | 100 x 45 x 50 cm (bas-relief pedestal) | 43 x 44 x 32 cm (taxidermy lamb)
Unique

The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’) after Leonardo, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a cardbaord rendition of a bullet damage, newspapers, a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a sculpture comprised of glass eyes and a metal stand.
220 x 170 x 70 cm (display case) | 70 x 7 cm (cardboard)
Unique

The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’) after Vélazquez, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a 19th-century head carving in marble, a wooden reclining Venus sculpture, a mirror and red velvet fabric.
200 x 220 x 80 cm (display case) | 40 x 30 x 30 cm (marble head) | 170 x 80 x 80 cm (wooden Venus)
Unique

Self Portrait at the Age of 63 after Rembrandt, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing the sculpture of Rembrandt’s head in wax and a metal frame.
166,4 x 127 x 53,3 cm (display case)
Unique

The Madonna of the Cat (‘La Madonna del Gatto’) after Baroccio, 2022
Installation comprised of a display case containing a taxidermy goldfinch and a porcelain hand.
147,5 x 81,2 x 40,5 cm (display case) | 12 x 10 x 7 cm (goldfinch) | 12 x 37 x 37 cm (porcelain hand)
Unique

Photos © The National Gallery, London, 2022

Ali Cherri presents work that considers how histories of trauma can be explored through a response to museum and gallery collections. This exhibition, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ introduces cabinets of curiosity into the heart of the Sainsbury Wing, containing assembled fragments that might look like relics from another collection.

Starting with research in the National Gallery’s archive, Cherri uncovered accounts of five paintings that were vandalised while on display. He was struck by the public’s highly emotional response to these attacks, finding that newspaper articles would describe the damages as if they were wounds inflicted on a living being – even referring to the Gallery’s conservators as surgeons. He also noticed an overwhelming urge to ‘heal’, make good and hide the damage. This personification of artworks, and the suggestion that they can experience distress, is reflected in the exhibition’s title, taken from Shakespeare’s play ‘The Merchant of Venice’. In response, Cherri presents a series of mixed media, sculptural installations that recall aspects of each painting and that imagine its life following the vandalism. They bring into question what Cherri calls the ‘politics of visibility’; the decisions we make about how, and to what extent, we accept trauma within museums. By translating each damaged work into a series of strange objects, Cherri reminds us that we are never truly the same after experiencing violence. Assembled in five old-fashioned vitrines reminiscent of early museum displays and cabinets of curiosity, lined up in the Sainsbury Wing and surrounded by Renaissance paintings that often show wounds and suffering, Cherri’s installations resonate with sympathy.

The Gatekeepers, 2020
Wooden poles, metal, taxidermy, woodcarving, various objects

Totem 1: Fire
Sheep skin, 20th century mask assigned to the Bushong ethnic group in Zaire made in light tropical wood, darkly framed, for use in initiation ceremonies, characterized by its protruding eyes and serrated pattern on the forehead, burlap hood, decorated with feathers and cowrie shells, bast beard, Krahn mask with a fantastic beast’s head, Ivory Coast, second half of the 20^th century, ostrich feathers, neoprene tube, paint.

Totem 2: Earth
Boar mask from Melanesia, 1^st half of the 20th century: brown softwood, three-dimensional representation of a small boar’s head with two tusks inserted, weathered, strong, inactive termite infestation, Taxidermy Phacochoerus aethiopicus, Sylvicapra grimmia grimmia, and Raphicerus campestri, with the taxidermist’s stamp on the reverse: ‘Nico van Rooyen Taxidermy’; natural hair, paint.

Totem 3: Wind
Melanesian mask probably from the Sepik region, 1st half of the 20^th century: hardwood with remains of old paint, presumably ancestral mask, eyes made from cowrie shells, real hair; mask depicting a face causing fear, Guéré people, Ivory Coast, ca. 1960: wood, fibers, textiles, iron, hair and other materials, aluminium rod, paint.

Totem 4: Water
Grotesque mask in metal, ca. 1970, taxidermy fish, plastic tubes, paint.

Commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille, supported by [N.AI] Project, Ammodo and Drosos Foundation
Photos © Jean Christophe Lett / Manifesta et © Ali Cherri

The Gatekeepers draws on the tradition of erecting totem poles at the gates of certain communities. These vertical pillars can welcome, warn or simply tell the story of the people who once lived there. Using figures inspired by the animal kingdom, the aquatic world or crossbreed beasts, The Gatekeepers welcome visitors to the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Marseille and offer a tribute to the souls of all the animals lodged in the Museum d’Histoire naturelle, only a few steps away, in the opposite wing of Palais Longchamp. Despite the proximity of both these institutions, they reassert the divide between nature and culture – a key feature of knowledge production in western modernity. These vertical pillars offer a substitute to the “pillars of knowledge” that these museums represent, while also echoing the colonnade balcony that connects them both.

The Book of Mud, 2018-2020
Published by Dongola Limited Editions
Vision and Direction: Abed Alkadiri
Edition of 65

The Book
Limited Edition of 65
Story by Ali Cherri
English Text | Lina Mounzer
Arabic Text | Mariam Janjelo
Design | Reza Abedini
Assistant Designer | Lama Barakat
Photography | Kassem Dabaji
Printing and Binding | Riad Youssef
Cover | Black fabric, Foil debossing
Inside pages | Offset printing on Freelife Vellum (140 gsm)
Binding | Double bound hardback
Printed in Beirut, Lebanon

The Mudbrick
Unique piece, 2019 | Artifact from the artist’s collection nested in handmade, sun-dried mudbrick
Made in Deux-Sèvres, France | Frantz Lavenu

The Print
Brickyard, 2020
Silkscreen printed in two colors on Oikos extra white (100 gsm) signed and numbered by the artist
Edition of 65
Printed in Beirut by Salim Samara

The Box
Carved beech massif, plywood, and MDF painted white host the book and brick with a pullout drawer and a plexiglass lid
Box Production | Tanya Elhajj

The Book of Mud is a manifesto, a reverie, a story of earth and water. From floods and deluges to droughts and water scarcity, mud is the materialisation of the aquatic reality of our world. Neither land nor water, yet also both, mud embodies an in-between state—a rich space for imagination.

Ali Cherri, the Paris-based Lebanese multidisciplinary artist, conceives The Book of Mud as an exploration of the past and the ways in which it inscribes itself physically: eroding, shaping, reforming, becoming itself through upheaval and destruction. In this project, Cherri is a storyteller in conversation with writers in both English and Arabic. Together they unveil the story of the mud – “… a story of perpetually shifting geographies, of elemental forces and terrain that cracks and rumbles and breaks over eons into new topographical formations. If mud had its own memory, what might it deem worth remembering?”

In this book of memory, Cherri understands mud as the vessel and the water within, as the brick that roots us to place and home, and the river that carries us to exploration elsewhere. Deeply embedded in narratives of creation, mud grounds life in a cycle that always finds its way back into the earth.

Artefacts, collected and encased in mudbrick, accompany the book to symbolise this timeless process. Worldly values embodied by these objects are once again ‘grounded,’ returned to the earth from which they came. A silkscreen print visualises a field of mudbricks drying in the sun, uniting earth and water as the building blocks of civilization. This art object, the culmination of a two-year project, features books, silkscreen, and mudbrick enclosed in a handcrafted white wooden box.

Graftings (A) – (J), 2018-2019
Variable dimensions
Unique

In agricultural botany, a graft is a sprout inserted into a slit on a trunk or stem of a living plant, from which it receives sap. In medicine, it’s a piece of living tissue that is transplanted surgically to replace diseased or injured tissue. Grafting is often used to create new varieties or species, and it can sometimes be made between different species, that is, human and animal.
By performing the assemblage of fragile things, a new appearance, a new life is granted.
These hybrids give us a glimpse into the power of matter. By looking at the life cycles of objects and the complexity of preservation and repre-sentation of matter, the relationships and tensions between the organic and synthetic, figurative and the abstract, the found and made object are revealed.

Graftings (A) – (J), 2018-2019
Variable dimensions
Unique

In agricultural botany, a graft is a sprout inserted into a slit on a trunk or stem of a living plant, from which it receives sap. In medicine, it’s a piece of living tissue that is transplanted surgically to replace diseased or injured tissue. Grafting is often used to create new varieties or species, and it can sometimes be made between different species, that is, human and animal.
By performing the assemblage of fragile things, a new appearance, a new life is granted.
These hybrids give us a glimpse into the power of matter. By looking at the life cycles of objects and the complexity of preservation and repre-sentation of matter, the relationships and tensions between the organic and synthetic, figurative and the abstract, the found and made object are revealed.

Graftings (A) – (J), 2018-2019
Variable dimensions
Unique

In agricultural botany, a graft is a sprout inserted into a slit on a trunk or stem of a living plant, from which it receives sap. In medicine, it’s a piece of living tissue that is transplanted surgically to replace diseased or injured tissue. Grafting is often used to create new varieties or species, and it can sometimes be made between different species, that is, human and animal.
By performing the assemblage of fragile things, a new appearance, a new life is granted.
These hybrids give us a glimpse into the power of matter. By looking at the life cycles of objects and the complexity of preservation and repre-sentation of matter, the relationships and tensions between the organic and synthetic, figurative and the abstract, the found and made object are revealed.

Graftings (A) – (J), 2018-2019
Variable dimensions
Unique

In agricultural botany, a graft is a sprout inserted into a slit on a trunk or stem of a living plant, from which it receives sap. In medicine, it’s a piece of living tissue that is transplanted surgically to replace diseased or injured tissue. Grafting is often used to create new varieties or species, and it can sometimes be made between different species, that is, human and animal.
By performing the assemblage of fragile things, a new appearance, a new life is granted.
These hybrids give us a glimpse into the power of matter. By looking at the life cycles of objects and the complexity of preservation and repre-sentation of matter, the relationships and tensions between the organic and synthetic, figurative and the abstract, the found and made object are revealed.

The Breathless Forest, 2019
Mixed-media in situ installation
Variable dimensions

Installation views: La Vitrine, Beirut Art Residency, Beirut, 2019

The Breathless Forest takes the form of a failed diorama, a three dimensional, life-size, simulated environment in which nature is put on display. By failing to immerse the viewer entirely in the illusion, The Breathless Forest explores “nature” as a construct embedded in the cultural, symbolic, and political orders of human history. Located on a busy street of Beirut, the installation offers a window through which the pedestrians can “peek into a dead forest”. While dioramas offer ways to produce permanence, to stop decomposition and keep things from disappearing, in The Breathless Forest decay seem to have already taken place. In spite of the death, the skinning and the dismemberment of the taxidermy animals composing the diorama, their glass eyes succeed in returning our gazing.

The Tower of Mud, 2019
Mixed media installation
Variable dimensions,
Unique

Eternity and a Day, 2019
Video

Fascination with mud—both as material and metaphor—has a long and rich history. Its transformation into a building substance is a process as old as humanity itself. Handcrafted brickmaking has been practiced for millennia and relies on all the natural elements: earth, water, fire, and air. The history of mud is one of ever-shifting geographies, elemental forces, and terrains that crack open into new topographical formations. The earliest gods imagined by humankind shaped the world out of mud. From mud, humans fashioned pottery and the first containers for storage and transport. Mud also became a form of memory: it holds and preserves. The first form of life emerged from mud. The place where earth and water meet and intermingle gave birth to the early unicellular organisms that are the ancestors of all living, breathing beings—plants, animals, and fungi.

In The Tower of Mud (2019), bricks rise to form a vertical structure, a tower that emerges from a tradition as ancient as our earliest memories of time. Following the enduring and ever-evolving symbolism of aspiring toward verticality, The Tower of Mud stands as a commemorative monument to the union of soil and water. It is said that a handful of mud contains “more organized information than the surface of all other known planets.” If mud possessed its own memory, what might it recall?

With a deep historical awareness, Ali Cherri’s practice traces political and geological correspondences to examine the effects of catastrophe—both human-made and geological. In the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk (dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur, around 2100 BCE), “called god and man,” embarks on a quest for eternal life after witnessing his companion Enkidu die before his eyes. Enkidu’s death—he who was made of clay and water—confronted Gilgamesh with his own mortality, something he had never feared until that moment.

Drawing on various creation myths, Eternity and a Day (2019), created for the biennial, navigates stories of mud-formed beings like Enkidu, and of marshlands where one may drown yet also be reborn. Few spaces embody the periphery of human existence as powerfully as muddy swamps. Stagnant waters buzzing with insects and inhabited by creatures of all kinds reveal a complex tableau of muted, shadowy desolation—both unsettling and engulfing. Neither entirely land nor fully water, this in-between terrain is feared, enigmatic, and ghostly, associated with death and disease. Mud-harvesting sites are likewise literal geopolitical marshlands, where economic forces converge—from traditional brick quarries to the muddy wetlands of gold seekers.

Plot for a Possible Resurrection, 2018
Installation comprises mud bricks, a statue of Jesus Christ Resurrection in stone for the 15th century, a wooden statue of Jesus Christ, with a damaged face from the 15th century, water
Variable dimensions
Unique

Exhibition views: biennale internationale d’art contemporain de Melle, Le Grand Monnayage. Photo © Origins Studio

The placement of the archaeological object is central in the work of Ali Cherri. It raises questions about the choice of objects shown in museums because it is not trivial and indicates the vision that each culture wishes to give to its history, what trace we preserve from the past.
With Plot for a Possible Resurrection, Ali Cherri creates a space of archaeological excavations where objects are revealed showing traces of erosion. Mud serves to cultivate crops for its richness, but also engulfs everything during cataclysms. It is this mud that occupies the exhibition space and exposes some objects that it has imprisoned within. Nature always takes over and therefore, the objects transformed by man erode. The cut stone becomes stone again, the soil becomes mud again.
Although the silver mines of Melle had been forgotten for several centuries, then were rediscovered, Ali Cherri was interested in the formation of layers of limestone and stalactites that the penetration of water formed on the stone rubble left by the miners. These natural marks of the passage of time and of the victory of nature over human interventions were sources of inspiration for the work Plot for a Possible Resurrection that becomes part of this biennial as a mirror of the mines.

Somniculus, 2017
HD video, colour, sound
14 min 40 sec
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Edition 1/5: Musée national d’art moderne/Centre Georges Pompidou
Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.

Filmed inside a series of empty museum galleries across Paris, Cherri’s new work Somniculus (the Latin word for “light sleep”) articulates the tension between the lives of dead objects and the living world that surrounds them. Artefacts from museums of ethnography, archaeology and natural sciences are all presented in their existing cultural context as the surviving objects of human interest. Preserved inside this structure of historiographic display, each object is representative of a place or a time and each artefact lives on as a container of its own history. What if we suspended these objects outside this constructed framework of controlled meaning? Would their ideological value become any less tangible?
As a result of periods of Enlightenment, imperialism and colonial expansion over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, museums in Paris became some of the world’s most encyclopaedic institutions. The trajectory of the modern museum, from the cabinet of curiosities to a nationalist project to the colonial institution, and on to the neoliberal structure of the present day, reflects the shifting ideologies of our civilization. In Somniculus, the viewer is presented with a series of windows through which the objects in the museum escape these ideological regimes altogether. We see how these objects might relate to us in a pre-modern sense, as objects endowed with their own autonomy and agency.
Although the modern era has given rise to a divide between the living and the non-living, human and nonhuman, culture and nature, the project of existing museum practice seeks to bring objects of the past to life by reactivating historical narratives. Forming a discontinuity, the mummified bodies from ancient Egypt, taxidermy wildlife and fragments of non-European cultures found in Somniculus seem less than alive, yet they speak to us and haunt us still, as if to transcend their contained existence. The objects no longer represent a coherent representational universe, defined by ordering and classification, but rather the beginning of another fiction.
Though it would seem that the modern museum is a space of the object rather than the subject, the human body has played an integral role in the construction of our world as we know it. While the evolution of man is often defined by anthropological and anatomical developments in science, our physical relationship to objects in museums is often one of passive detachment. We are reminded that the idea of looking is not a political act of questioning the reality before us, but a way of probing the origin of the gaze itself. A camera lingers over torch-lit objects whose eyes shine back at us, while other objects lack the ability to see altogether – their view is that of an abyss or a black hole. Is it the lack of sight that prevents them from seeing, or the absence of eyes?
The apparent necessity of seeing, the act of closing and opening the eyes, recalls the inevitability of sleep and its inescapable shadow: death. Shining a light on these spaces of perpetual significance within Western culture, Somniculus brings a heightened awareness to the act of looking and seeing in the museum. As an anonymous man sleeps in an otherwise empty gallery we realise that he too is representative of a culture, a time, a place. These fragments of loss, destruction and violence stand in as representations of civilizations’ past. In accordance with the cultures they serve to represent, these objects are neither caught inside the deep dark past nor immediately visible in the light of our present day, but forever waiting to be awakened.

— Osei Bonsu

Where do birds go to hide (I), 2017
Installation comprises a tree trunk, animal bones, grafting mastic, hand-drawn canvas and wood
Variable dimensions
Unique
Exhibition views: Biennale de Lyon 2017. Photo © Blaise Adilon

Where do birds go to hide (II), 2017
Installation comprises a tree trunk and a Russian specimen of a sparrow from a museum cabinet dated from 1879, metallic bars and hand-drawn canvas
Variable dimensions
Unique
Exhibition views: Dénaturé, Galerie Imane Farès, 2017-2018; MAC International, MAC, Belfast, 2017. Photo © Simon Mills

The installations Where do birds go to hide (I) and (II) turns the encounter with objects freed from normative standards into a spectacle. A dead tree; animal bones; the skin of a taxidermy bird: each of these things on its own is mere debris. But when they are brought together, when they are grafted onto one another in such a way that creates relationships between them, they rise to a new status: that of an active encounter. They are given emotional value: these long-dead things become bodies with the capacity to affect and be affected.
In agricultural botany, a graft is a sprout inserted into a slit on a trunk or stem of a living plant, from which it receives sap. In medicine, it’s a piece of living tissue that is transplanted surgically to replace diseased or injured tis-sue. In the former, grafting is often used to create new varieties of a single plant, or an entire new species of plant. In the latter, grafts can sometimes be made between members of different species, that is, human and animal. In both cases, a new appearance, a new life is granted: when the sap, or blood, begins to circulate seamlessly through the organism, the graft has been successful. By performing the assemblage of fragile things, connective agency is first enabled and then allowed to flow. This is not a metaphorical association of signifiers; a useless corpse has no autonomous desire to be anything other than what it is. These encounters instead give us a glimpse into the power of matter.
Likewise, sometimes, a tree can morph and change its shape in order to host the fall of a dead sparrow (or is it only sleeping?).

— Ali Cherri

The Flying Machine, 2017
Installation made of wood, bamboo, crow wings, ropes and metal
270 x 700 x 200 cm (with wings spread)
Edition of 1 + 1 AE
Installation views: FIAC Hors-les-Murs 2017, Jardin des Tuileries. Photos © Ali Cherri ; MACLyon, 2020, Photos © Blaise Adilon.

As homage to dreamers, The Flying Machine installation looks back at the early dreams of flying, from Abbas Ibn Firnas to Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers. Man has always dreamt of breaking the mold of formality of his body, in order to remain suspended in air and defy gravity. Flying machines went through different phases. First attempts of flying were done by using ropes against a series of pulleys of varying sizes in order to increase power. But soon, we learned that the gliding flight of birds, rather than wing motion itself, was the way to go for humans to achieve any sustained flight for an extended period. The next step would be not imitating nature at all but designing and building winged gliders exclusively by and for human use in mind. The dream of flight opens our horizon to listen, to feel the subtle movements of our soul, to feel the body breaking with its form, weight, organs, bound-ness,breaking and not fearing what this break may bring in the future.
The installation is comprised of a giant wing, made out of 100 taxidermy crow wings assembled together. My recurrent use of taxidermy arises from the complex reality it brings forth, as can be seen in the artwork Démembrement (2014). Taxidermy is a shape-shifter, easily sliding between categories of objects and between objects and experiences. Taxidermy was employed as a fallacious technology that simulates a communion with nature, thus offering a form of cure for the threats and decadence of modern life. As for crows, they are considered as totems and spirit guides associated with life mysteries and magic.
The wing will be suspended on what seems to be a prototype of a flying machine structure. Inspired by the early drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, the structure is made out of bamboo, with different ropes and pulleys holding the wing hovering above the ground.
The Flying Machine is a hybrid machine, bringing together elements of what we divide as nature/culture; the bamboo once a living plant becomes now a construction element, the taxidermy crow wing once a living flight organ is now pinned to the ground. The human and non-human, the organic and technological, carbon and silicon, history and myth, modernity and postmodernity, nature and culture, all these divisions and dichotomies appear here as inadequate for understanding our world.
The Flying Machine takes the shape of an unfinished project, a work-in-progress of some dreamer who, by observing nature challenges and puts our bodies in an impossible position: the human body is up in the air, defying gravity, breaking the law- a formality of movement.

— Ali Cherri

Petrified/Fragments (I), 2016
Installation includes Fragments (I), fragmentary archaeological artefacts, ethnographic objects, skull casting, taxidermy bird, light table, variable dimensions, unique, and Petrified, single-channel video, color and sound, duration: 12 min, edition of 5
Installation views: Aichi Triennal, 2016; Sursosk Museum, 2016.

Petrified/Fragments (II), 2016
Installation includes Fragments (II),  archaeological artefacts, taxidermy bird, light table, variable dimensions, unique, and Petrified, single-channel video, color and sound, duration: 12 min, edition of 5
Coll. MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine, France
Installation views: Matérialité de l’invisible, Centquatre, 2016. Photo © Marc Domage; Sursock Museum, 2017; Statues Also Die, Fondazione Museo delle Antichità Egizie di Torino, 2018.

Ali Cherri’s work, Petrified/Fragments, consists of a video shot in a wildlife park and an archaeological museum in the United Arab Emirates, and an installation of objects gathered on a light table.
It offers a critical point of view on the process of patrimonialization of archaeological objects, from the excavation sites to the museum display.
The objects filmed in the video, emerging alternately from the darkness, are the same ones facing us, in procession on the light table. They come from various eras and civilizations, heterogeneous in their materials, but all of them feature faces or bodies. Ali Cherri acquired them at auction. Far from the civilization that saw them appear and gives them meaning, they feed the art market – whether their authenticity is proven or not. Here, these relics are devoid of name, title or date, label or cartel: they appear to us as floating, disconnected from any language. This mutism results from their status as exhumed fragments, and reveals the nature of the excavation work, which, according to the artist, consists concretely and symbolically of a real uprooting.

“Why is there excitement about certain things? I went to several auction houses to film and I also bought some pieces, mostly the cheaper ones, many of which were fake even though they were often sold as being authentic with a certificate and provenance. For the installation of Fragments, I placed these objects on a large light table, equally on the same level, without any text or reference, to encourage people to look at them, not as what they represent, but for what they are, to erase the meta narrative around them. Also, there was a strong human-like quality to many of the objects which made it seem as if they were looking back at us, as if we were subjected to their gaze as much they were to ours.”

— Ali Cherri, in Blaire Dessent, Friedrich Lüth and Ali Cherri, Thinking about modern archaeology and the value of an object, TL mag, 2018

The Egyptian Scale (Triptych), 2016
Historical photographs, ca. 1900-1920, ink and charcoal
38 x 52 cm (each)
Unique

The Egyptian Scale is based on a series of photographs of Egyptian ruins and temples from 1900-1920 made by the Swiss photographer V. de Mestral-Combremont. In each plate, the photographer placed an Egyptian man to give a sense of the size of the architecture. By applying a layer of Ink and charcoal on top of the original plates a new reading arise: the drawing of a grid highlights how the “local” Egyptian was used as a measuring scale. This western gaze upon ruins is part of the construct of a value system that was set by modernity. The red ink flow on the photograph highlights the position of the Egyptian man, but also annunciate a moment of violence upon historical ruins.

The Disquiet, 2013
HD video, colour, sound
20 min
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Supported by AFAC, The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture
Co-production: Galerie Imane Farès, Paris

Dubai International Film Festival: Best Director, 2014
Associação Cultural Videobrasil: Honorable Mention, 2015

Earth-shattering events are relatively rare for the course in Lebanon, with war, political upheaval and a number of social revolts. While the Lebanese focus on surface level events that could rock the nation, few realize that below the ground we walk on, an actual shattering of the earth is moun-ting. Lebanon stands on several major fault lines, which are cracks in the earth’s crust. The Disquiet investigates the geological situation in Lebanon, seeking out the traces of the imminent disaster.
Sequences of long walks in nature alternate with seismographic mecha-nisms inscribing a disaster-in-becoming and then with history of recent earthquakes in Lebanon through archival images and old drawings.
An inevitability of natural and political synchronicities in a given region, that reigns in the voiceover narration, is transformed in the last part of the film. A space for hope is introduced, where it is su ested that one has to leave the document(ary) mode of narrating and enter into a speculation, in solitude and lucidity of one’s own mind and beliefs.

Trembling Landscape (Damascus), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Tehran), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Algiers), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Erbil), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Mekkah), 2014
Trembling Landscape (Beirut), 2014
Lithographic Prints and Archival Ink Stamps
40 x 60 cm or 70 x 100 cm (Beirut) (each)
Edition of 7 + 2 AP (each)

Exhibition views: Trembling Landscape, Sep. 2020 – Jan. 2021, Eye Filmmuseum © Studio Hans Wilschut

In Trembling Landscapes, a series of ink-stamped aerial maps of Algiers, Beirut, Damascus, Erbil, Mekkah, and Tehran, Ali Cherri highlights fault lines that have resulted in catastrophic earthquakes, juxtaposing them with instances of political unrest and architectural development. The maps are reminiscent of well-known photographs of cities destroyed in the Second World War, or more recent image filmed by hovering drones, but without a clear reference about whether the given city is in the state before or after the catastrophe. What they offer though is retrieval of memory that we share and too often suppress, as well as a possibility to transform this information into a metaphor for the unrest that envelops those cities ceaselessly.
In the most recent addition to this series, he explores the Islamic holy city of Mekkah, focusing on an invisible fissure associated with a religious fable about a vision of the Day of Judgment that portends a violent earthquake, where people will be raised from the dead, and give account of themselves to receive their just rewards—a commentary on the town’s rapid construction and the corresponding erosion of its heritage.

The Digger, 2015
HD Video, colour, sound, Arabic and Pashto with English subtitles
24 min
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Edition 1/5: Sharjah Art Foundation
Edition 2/5: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Edition 3/5: Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille
Produced by Sharjah Art Foundation

Synopsis:
Shot in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates, The Digger follows the everyday life of Sultan Zeib Khan, the Pakistani caretaker who has been guarding the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis for twenty years. A witness to the nation’s founding mythologies, Sultan preserves archeological ruins, keeping them from falling into ruin. In the midst of these empty graves that echo the vastness of the desert, the absence of corpses is more unsettling than their presence.

‘‘My approach to archeology is not motivated by love of ruins, but by a desire to excavate that which has survived. While one end of archeology culminates in the encasing of History within exquisitely-lit, precisely-labeled glass boxes, on the other end there is the raw material, the archeological site itself, with all its potential sculptural qualities. The discovery of an excavation site goes hand- in-hand with its destruction: the more we unearth, the more we destroy.
In the past years, the United Arab Emirates has witnessed a number of archeological discoveries. The U.A.E. is a place said to be always running away from its urban ruins: as soon as a structure starts to decay, the machines of demolition and reconstruction roar forth to erase its traces. The film follows the guard of the archeological ruins, Sultan, on his daily tour around the 5000-year-old necropolis. The film blurs the boundary of documentary and video art, but it essentially blurs the position of the artist as a historian or as a chronicler.

— Ali Cherri

Pipe Dreams, 2005
2 channels video installation
5 min 10 sec (in loop)
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

In an historic phone call between the late President Hafez El Assad and the Syrian astronaut Mohammad Fares, we witness the father of the nation questioning the hero about his impressions as he looks down on the Syrian lands. A conversation that features the eternal leader, who, from the comforts of his office, casts a watchful eye on the children of the nation, even as they are thousands of miles away up in space. This is the end of the 1980s, when the young revolutionaries of the recent past, in Libya, in Iraq, in Egypt and in Syria, had made their grabs for power and asserted themselves as the sole and eternal leaders of their countries. Countries where power is fed by symbols: by statues of the founding father, larger-than-life photos, the leader’s orations, and of course, by heroes.
In a sort of mise en abyme, we see President Hafez El Assad through a monitor, addressing the astronaut in his spaceship through an identical monitor: an infinite loop of the image of the father looking upon the hero. A glorious moment for the leader of the nation as his power rubbed elbows with the Soviet dream of conquering space.
Twenty-five years later, at the beginning of the upheavals in Syria in 2011, the authorities, fearing vandalism, dismantled the statues of Hafez el Assad in the protesting towns. When power begins to lose its Monuments, it is the beginning of the end; the countdown has started and lift-off is imminent. Haunted by the image of statues destroyed, from Stalin to Saddam Hussein, the regime tried to head off the inevitable, sacrificing the Symbol in order to safeguard the Image.
This interface between two moments in recent Syrian history encapsulates the history of the entire region: the mechanisms of the construction and deconstruction of totalitarian power, the dreams and disillusions of an entire people.
By taking this perspective on the events that are currently shaking up the region, Pipe Dreams seeks to call the poetic into the political… It is art’s ceaseless attempt to place the personal narrative into the larger one of political history.