Ali Cherri

Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) is a renowned Paris-based artist with a multidisciplinary practice that includes film, performance, sculpture, drawing, and installations. His work explores political violence in Lebanon and other regions, focusing on how violence permeates bodies and physical landscapes. Influenced by the postwar art scene in Beirut, Cherri investigates the connection between conflict imagery, urban structures, and his own body. Through interventions on archaeological collections, Cherri challenges traditional museum values by reintroducing discarded fragments as hybrid creatures that embody colonial violence in the history of archaeology. His film tetralogy The Disquiet (2013), The Digger (2015), The Dam (2022), and The Watchman (2023) examines political landscapes in Lebanon, Cyprus, and Sudan, tracing the marks of past events. Cherri received the Silver Lion Award at the 59th Venice Biennale. Mud, symbolizing creation’s primordial substance, is central to his recent sculptural work. In exhibitions such as Humble and Quiet and Soothing as Mud (2023) and Dreamless Night (2023), Cherri brings mud to life with monumental representations, challenging chronologies and the latent dangers of civilization. His work also engages with Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures and paintings in Envisagement (2024) at the Institut Giacometti in Paris. Cherri’s exhibition Dreamless Night opened at Frac Bretagne in February 2024.