Audio Guide by Ali Cherri (ENG)
Guide audio par Ali Cherri (FR)
Gairloch Gardens & Centennial Square
Saturday, June 13, 2026 | 2–5 PM
Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) is a Paris-based artist with three decades of artistic practice spanning across film, performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and installation. Highly influenced by the Lebanese postwar art scene, Ali Cherri’s complex body of work interrogates how histories and currencies of political violence resonate through generations as well as cultural landscapes and objects. Awarded the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and exhibited in leading museums around the world, Cherri presents films, sculptures and watercolour paintings in both our galleries as well as in Gairloch Gardens.
At the Gairloch Gallery, Ali Cherri presents a series of sculptures, assembled elegantly between different materials, each a hybrid involving artifacts found by the artist in auctions or marketplaces, originating from different eras and cultural origins. Adjacent to the sculptures is a series of watercolour paintings of prickly-pear cacti, contrasting the plants' sharp thorns with their radiant blooms, a shifting metaphor for trauma, violence and endurance under duress in conflict zones, both historical and current. The film Of Men and Gods and Mud explores the relationship between people, labour, and the environment in North Sudan. Installed outdoors in the sculpture garden is the bronze sculpture The Tree of Life, which reinterprets ancient Assyrian reliefs of a sacred tree, and the neon sculpture Les (Sur)Vivants, which poetically references the perils of surviving catastrophe. As part of our summer program, Ali Cherri also presents two evenings of his films as part of Sunset Kino. Stay tuned for an updated Sunset Kino program.
At the Centennial Gallery, Ali Cherri presents the hypnotic film The Watchman, which features a soldier on watch before the no-man’s land in Cyprus between the Greek Cypriot south and the Turkish Cypriot north. As with much of Cherri’s work, the film concerns itself with notions of borders and the challenges they enact upon ideas of sovereignty, identity, and geopolitical realities.
The rich tapestry of Ali Cherri’s work oscillates between history and memory, realities of violence and residues of trauma, political spectacle and the stuff of dreams, ancient objects and myth and sensuality, death and survival, fragility and resilience, materiality and mortality, and museal knowledge and its ruins. The exhibition is supported by TD Bank Group.
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.
His film tetralogy, The Disquiet (2013), The Digger (2015), The Dam (2022), and The Watchman (2023), the subject of accolades and presentations in institutions as well as film festivals, is an extended meditation on political landscapes, from Lebanon to Cyprus and Sudan, imprinted with the traces of past events. Cherri is the recipient of the Silver Lion Award at the 59th Venice Biennale. In Venice, the video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022) brings together our current predicament at the intersection of ecological disaster and the search for new grand narratives.
Mud, the primeval matter of our creation stories, both resilient and fragile, signals a new sculptural direction for the artist. In his most recent institutional exhibitions, Humble and quiet and soothing as mud (2023) at Swiss Institute and Dreamless Night (2023) at GAMeC, Cherri brings mud to life with monumental eagles, soldiers or the transtemporal history of mankind, blurring chronologies and alerting us to the latent dangers of civilization as an inherently destructive process. The telluric movements of history in Cherri’s work draw us towards a cartography of impermanence.
The artist’s expanded dialogue between art, archaeology and the fabric of historical time brought him recently in conversation with the work of modernist sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, around the representation of the human face in the exhibition Envisagement (2024) at the Institut Giacometti in Paris. The interposition with Giacometti’s sculptures and paintings brings to the fore not only Cherri’s interest in the body and history, but also on the afterlife of artifacts and museological narratives. Ali Cherri’s exhibition Dreamless Night opened in Frac Bretagne in February 2024.
— Ari Akkermans, writer and art critic
Ali Cherri's works are included in the collections of MoMA New York, the British Museum, the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Georges Pompidou, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Cnap (Centre National des Arts Plastiques), among others.
Tuesday – Saturday:
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Monday (by appointment)
Closed Sunday + statutory holidays
Free Admission
