Ali Cherri
Ali Cherri was born in 1976 in Beirut, Lebanon, and is based in Paris. Working across film, performance, sculpture, drawing, and installation, he interrogates the ways political violence disseminates into bodies and landscapes. He was the recipient of the Silver Lion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). His films The Disquiet (2013), The Digger (2015), and The Dam (2022) have been presented internationally, while recent institutional exhibitions include Swiss Institute, New York (2023), GAMeC, Bergamo (2023), and Institut Giacometti, Paris (2024). His works are held in the collections of the British Museum, Centre Pompidou, MoMA, and the Guggenheim.
A MONUMENT TO SUBTLE ROT
2024
slide projection, set of 80 35mm photographic slides (transparencies)
Courtesy of the artist and Imane Farès gallery
Ali Cherri exposes history as a fiction: highly constructed, subjective, and usually inflected by the narrative of the colonizer. Cherri speaks from the context of the wars and violence that have shaped the Middle East, infusing them with characters and narratives from mythology. The slide projection A Monument to Subtle Rot combines quotes from Palestinian novelist Karim Kattan on monuments with photographs of different monuments being dismantled in Aleppo, Kharkiv, Baghdad and Bristol, among other places.