Ali Cherri
Exploring different geographies of violence in his native Lebanon but also in the broader region, Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) is a Paris-based artist with three decades of artistic practice spanning across film, performance, sculpture – in terra and bronze –, drawing, and installations, interrogating the ways in which political violence disseminates into people’s bodies and the physical and cultural landscape. Shaped by the vibrant artistic scene of postwar Beirut in the 1990s, Cherri began to investigate the sensorial coproduction of reality between images of conflict, the urban fabric and his own body.
Through the moving image and the accidented journeys of cultural artifacts, the artist discovered in the visual analysis of the political construction of history, the underlying intimate relationship between narratives of cultural value, the configuration of the past and violence itself. In a series of interventions on archaeological collections, Cherri sets out to confront the traditional signifiers of value in the museum by reintroducing fragments and artifacts that had been otherwise discarded in the form of hybrid creatures that embody the history of archaeology as a tale of colonial violence.
— Ari Akkermans, writer and art critic
Recent solo exhibitions include Today is O.K. (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2026); Soul Witness (WIELS, Brussels, 2026); Sommeils légers (Musée Dobrée, Nantes, 2026); To Fall, Patiently (Oakville Galleries, Oakville, 2026); Les Veilleurs([mac] Musée d’art contemporain de Marseille, 2025); Twenty-Four Ghosts per Second (Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2025); How I Am Monument (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2025; Vienna Secession, 2024); Returning the Gaze (Museo Egizio, Turin, 2024); A Monument to Subtle Rot (Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, 2024); ENVISAGEMENT (Giacometti Institute, Paris, 2024); Le Songe d’une nuit sans rêve (Frac Bretagne, Rennes, 2024); Dreamless Night (GAMeC, Bergamo, 2023); Humble and quiet and soothing as mud (Swiss Institute, New York, 2023); Ceux qui nous regardent (CAC La Traverse, Alfortville, 2023); If you prick us, do we not bleed?(National Gallery, London, 2022); Return of the Beast (Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, 2021); Tales from the Riverbed (Clark House, Mumbai, 2018); From Fragment to Whole (Jönköping County Museum, Jönköping, 2018); Satellite 10: Somniculus Programme (CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2017); A Taxonomy of Fallacies: The Life of Dead Objects (Sursock Museum, Beirut, 2016). In 2027, Kunsthalle Praha (Prague) will present a solo exhibition of his work.
Alongside this, Cherri has developed a body of film work – The Disquiet (2013), The Digger (2015), The Dam (2022), The Watchman (2023), and The Sentinel (2026) – presented in institutions as well as at film festivals. His first feature film, The Dam, was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, The Watchman for International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2024, and The Sentinel for Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2026.
His work has recently been exhibited at Le Voyage à Nantes (La Machine du Sacré, 2026), Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm, 2026), the Musée départemental Arles antique (Arles, 2026), the BnF (Paris, 2025), the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia), Jameel Arts Centre (Dubai), Para Site (Hong Kong), MAXXI (Rome), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the 22nd Videobrasil Biennial (2024), the 15th and 13th Sharjah Biennials (2023, 2017), the 5th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India, 2022), the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), Manifesta 13 (Marseille, 2020), the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (Ekaterinburg, 2019), and the 8th Melle International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Melle, 2018).
He received the Robert E. Fulton Fellowship from Harvard University (2016), was a resident at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (2017), and was nominated for the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2018). In 2022, he received the Silver Lion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams.
His works are part of numerous collections, including the Museo Egizio (Turin), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Pinault Collection (Paris), the British Museum (London), Art Jameel (Dubai), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Mathaf (Doha), SeMA – Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul), [mac] Musée d’art contemporain de Marseille, and the Bonnefanten (Maastricht).