Viewing room

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.

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.

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.

Inconnus, 2013
Drawings on black paper
60 x 60 cm (series of 4 drawings) or 20 x 20 (series of 10 drawings)
Unique

Installation views: Songs of Loss and Songs of Love, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2014; Castelli Gallery, New York, 2019.

For Harraki, the botanical metaphor of grafting, trellising, and erecting corresponds to his way of considering patrilineal history and its transmission, subjects that have been at the core of his practice since 2010 and constitute another important link between Harraki and his generation of artists. History has long been grafted onto the genealogies of major religious or political figures, so the family tree offers the artist a way to explore the processes of abnormal selection – that is, manipulation or exclusion – that underlie this History. Yet, in Harraki’s hands, this archetype proves to be much broader than its standardized concept found in textbooks, genealogies, or biographies.
Although many drawings retain the shape of the trees already mentioned, in other cases any organic reference point is lost in the sharp lines that cut deeply into the surface of the iron. In these drawings, the family tree becomes a bureaucratic organization chart or a well-drawn graph, a nod, perhaps, to the administration of history and its institutions, especially those of education. Like the organization chart and the graph, the family tree is useful precisely for its ability to transform complex human relationships into a linear form. It is also a form of dressage, which is used to explain social, historical and political contingencies using double entry tables, dependent variables, and generalizable theories. But the graphic simplicity of Harraki’s trees is deceptive, and it is the uncertainty and hybridity that characterizes his drawings. No surnames appear here. Only first names are engraved, like a caption, on the edge of the panels or, so to speak, in the margin of a page.

— Emma Chubb in Greffer, Espalier, Dresser, Éditions Hors’Champs, l’Appartement 22, 2020, p. 10-11 [our translation]

Inconnus, 2013
Drawings on black paper
60 x 60 cm (series of 4 drawings) or 20 x 20 (series of 10 drawings)
Unique

Installation views: Songs of Loss and Songs of Love, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2014; Castelli Gallery, New York, 2019.

For Harraki, the botanical metaphor of grafting, trellising, and erecting corresponds to his way of considering patrilineal history and its transmission, subjects that have been at the core of his practice since 2010 and constitute another important link between Harraki and his generation of artists. History has long been grafted onto the genealogies of major religious or political figures, so the family tree offers the artist a way to explore the processes of abnormal selection – that is, manipulation or exclusion – that underlie this History. Yet, in Harraki’s hands, this archetype proves to be much broader than its standardized concept found in textbooks, genealogies, or biographies.
Although many drawings retain the shape of the trees already mentioned, in other cases any organic reference point is lost in the sharp lines that cut deeply into the surface of the iron. In these drawings, the family tree becomes a bureaucratic organization chart or a well-drawn graph, a nod, perhaps, to the administration of history and its institutions, especially those of education. Like the organization chart and the graph, the family tree is useful precisely for its ability to transform complex human relationships into a linear form. It is also a form of dressage, which is used to explain social, historical and political contingencies using double entry tables, dependent variables, and generalizable theories. But the graphic simplicity of Harraki’s trees is deceptive, and it is the uncertainty and hybridity that characterizes his drawings. No surnames appear here. Only first names are engraved, like a caption, on the edge of the panels or, so to speak, in the margin of a page.

— Emma Chubb in Greffer, Espalier, Dresser, Éditions Hors’Champs, l’Appartement 22, 2020, p. 10-11 [our translation]

At the Time of the Ebb, 2019
Single-channel video, colour, stereo sound, master 4K
15 min 39 sec
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
Edition of 5 + 2 AP

Film credits: Director, Alia Farid; Director of Photography, Reza Abyat; Producer, Mahmoud Sani; Editors, Alia Farid and Cristian Manzutto; Color grading, Francois Nobecourt and Cristian Manzutto; Sound and Edit Mix, Cristian Manzutto; Post production studio, estudio de producción.

At the Time of the Ebb saw the artist travel one-hundred nautical kilometres from the easternmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the Iranian island of Qeshm. Here, she filmed the annual celebration of Nowruz Sayadeen (‘Fisherman’s New Year’). Such is the stage for Farid’s film essay, a melancholic meandering through the surviving festival traditions of an island seemingly cast out of time or, rather, living according to a rhythm very much of its own, attuned to ancient seasonal cycles. The work foregrounds a number of local residents, whose performances draw attention to their customs, ancient traditions, material surroundings and natural environment–from a brightly decorated domestic interior to an expansive sea view overlooking the Arabian Gulf.

The artist would like to acknowledge the following performers and collaborators: Yahye Irani, Hassan Chabok, Abdulrahman Poozan (Shushi); Mohammed Poozan, Mohammed Karoi, Ali Poozan, Ali Hasmi (camels); Shoja Chabok, Mohammed Tolandi, Shoja Mahmood Shadman, Ahmed Shadman Roob’e (horses); Salim Daryai (lion); Abdurahman Irani (Siyah Poosh); Mohammed Tamakhrah, Ahmed Shadman (white bird); Mohammed Ali Chabok, Akbar Deghani (pastor); Abdulla Irani, Huma Irani (pastor’s son); Baba Gholam (music); Farzad Draye (solo dance).

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.

Le dernier homme (1) – (7), 2015
Archival inkjets on paper
35 x 50 cm (each)
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Edition 3/3 dedicated to the complete series
Ed. 1/3, available: (1), (2), (4)
Ed. 2/3, available: (1), (2), (3), (4), (7)
Ed. 3/3, for the complete series: sold

High Noon (1) – (8), 2015
Series of 8 photographs, inkjet prints from 16 mm film stills
63 x 82,5 x 4 cm (each)
Edition of 3 + 1 AP (each)
Exhibition views: The Gap Between Us, The Mosaic Rooms, 2018. Photo © Andy Stagg, image courtesy The Mosaic Rooms

Every place on Earth is measured in terms of its distance to two imaginary lines.
The site at which longitude (vertical line) meets latitude (horizontal line) were fixed in Greenwich, England to be the Prime Meridian in 1884, at a time when the UK was a major colonial power, with the Northern and Southern Hemisphere divided by the imaginary line that is the equator, a line equidistant from the North and South Pole. Prior to this, there was no standardized time, no way to tell when the day started, or ended, or even how long that day was. Each place had it’s own system, it’s own Prime Meridian.
The photographic series High Noon takes that knowledge and launches us into a future beyond the Prime Meridian in which there is no North or South, no East or West. It takes us into a space where we cross time and space and can imagine being everywhere all at once. The images trap in their compositions a hallucinogenic portrait of two places in the same ephemeral moment: The West Coast of Southern California and South Eastern Japan.
Based on the idea that sometimes we are in fact standing on the earth « Upside Down » and my own personal background as a Palestinian – a people oppressed, exiled, forced into migration, or nomadism and explores it through the basic human condition of being lost in the world when we feel we are from Nowhere. High noon takes us on a journey through time and space through film stills that catch a hallucinogenic glimpse of what a post-apocalyptic paradise. One of a roll of Black and White shot in Southern California, the other a roll of color film shot in Onomichi Japan, both 16mm film.
Taking it’s title from the American film genre of the Western, High Noon is the term used to described the meeting point between good and evil (in relation to the film genre, it refers to a showdown between cowboys and indians) to resolve a conflict. In this photographic series, it is an invitation to move beyond a dual and into the future.

High Noon (1) – (8), 2015
Series of 8 photographs, inkjet prints from 16 mm film stills
63 x 82,5 x 4 cm (each)
Edition of 3 + 1 AP (each)
Exhibition views: The Gap Between Us, The Mosaic Rooms, 2018. Photo © Andy Stagg, image courtesy The Mosaic Rooms

Every place on Earth is measured in terms of its distance to two imaginary lines.
The site at which longitude (vertical line) meets latitude (horizontal line) were fixed in Greenwich, England to be the Prime Meridian in 1884, at a time when the UK was a major colonial power, with the Northern and Southern Hemisphere divided by the imaginary line that is the equator, a line equidistant from the North and South Pole. Prior to this, there was no standardized time, no way to tell when the day started, or ended, or even how long that day was. Each place had it’s own system, it’s own Prime Meridian.
The photographic series High Noon takes that knowledge and launches us into a future beyond the Prime Meridian in which there is no North or South, no East or West. It takes us into a space where we cross time and space and can imagine being everywhere all at once. The images trap in their compositions a hallucinogenic portrait of two places in the same ephemeral moment: The West Coast of Southern California and South Eastern Japan.
Based on the idea that sometimes we are in fact standing on the earth « Upside Down » and my own personal background as a Palestinian – a people oppressed, exiled, forced into migration, or nomadism and explores it through the basic human condition of being lost in the world when we feel we are from Nowhere. High noon takes us on a journey through time and space through film stills that catch a hallucinogenic glimpse of what a post-apocalyptic paradise. One of a roll of Black and White shot in Southern California, the other a roll of color film shot in Onomichi Japan, both 16mm film.
Taking it’s title from the American film genre of the Western, High Noon is the term used to described the meeting point between good and evil (in relation to the film genre, it refers to a showdown between cowboys and indians) to resolve a conflict. In this photographic series, it is an invitation to move beyond a dual and into the future.