Ali Cherri

Imane Farès gallery and Dongola Limited Editions are pleased to announce the launch of Ali Cherri’s first artist’s edition, The Book of Mud.
The launch will take place at Imane Farès gallery in Paris, and will begin with a short presentation (in French) by Ali Cherri about the book’s process, creation, and subsequent materialization.

Story: Ali Cherri
English Text: Lina Mounzer
Arabic Text: Mariam Janjelo
Vision and Direction: Abed Alkadiri
Design: Reza Abedini
Assistant Designer: Lama Barakat
Page Photography: Kassem Dabaji
Published by Dongola Limited Editions, 2020

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 | 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, and reforming its surroundings, and 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 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. Each art object, the culmination of a two-year project, features a book, a silkscreen, and a singular artefact embedded in a mudbrick enclosed in a handcrafted white wooden box.

Published by Dongola Limited Editions, The Book of Mud was first launched at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai on February 15, 2020.

Conceived as a limited edition of 65, The Book of Mud is on sale through the Dongola Limited Editions website and at Imane Farès gallery.