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.

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.

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

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.