Ali Cherri, Archeologist of Our Time
Having been awarded a Silver Lion at the last Venice Biennale, the visual artist
Ali Cherri has now directed The Dam, which will be released in France on March 1st, 2023. This feature film is the extension of a body of work which amounts to an archaeological attentiveness to our time.
Operating the transition between the video screens of an installation to the big screen of the cinema cannot be a simple formality in either direction. Few succeed outright in these two fields without getting lost in the process. We can therefore only commend the success of those who, like Albert Serra, Clément Cogitore or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, naturally seem to pass from one “language” to another. With The Dam (2022), it seems clear that Ali Cherri has earned his place in this exclusive circle.
Before focusing on this remarkable transition, it is necessary to attempt a brief inventory of the lively and surprising visual territory which was awarded at the 59th Venice Biennale. (1) The artist, of Lebanese origin, was born in 1976 at the very beginning of the terrible period of civil war. As a child, Ali Cherri was initially shaped by his wanderings through a necessarily microcosmic Beirut, before daring “to cross this unknown city, standing alone in the ruins of gutted buildings”, (2) passing from an enclosed space to the vertigo of a wounded reality. He only gradually became aware of his repressed trauma, that of a people as much as his own. In one of his first videos, A Circle Around the Sun (2005), he tried his hand at a physical exploration of these inner stigmas: descending tracking shots slowly reveal a tangle of interlocking buildings, seemingly emptied of any human presence despite the sound of road traffic, and accompanied by a voiceover by the artist who remembers having thought about “a city eating itself.” Ruins appear to be a fundamental motif in his work, reflected by his interest in archaeology and its museal counterpart, and in his inces
sant questioning of the aesthetics of fragments and disappearance, which finds a striking expression in The Digger (2015). This short film depicts the daily life, hallucinated and as if suspended in time, of a man who acts as a caretaker and a labourer at an archaeological site lost in a desert in the United Arab Emirates.
The natural corollary of this fascination with vestiges appears to be the hybridisation of disparate materials in order to create new objects, bodies and spaces. In the installation The Breathless Forest (2019), stuffed gazelles are frozen in a mineral landscape dotted with dead trees, whereas the series Dead Inside (2021) reuses stuffed animals, this time birds, fish and small mammals, which become the models for delicate watercolours listing various species in a mysterious inventory which Ali Cherri fleshes out with car wrecks.
The artist is attracted to museums, so much so that in 2017, he created the Somniculus video, consisting of a night-time tour of five Parisian museums, torch in hand, alternately capturing images of the waking or sleeping visitor and of various objects. As if by an occasional dream effect, the artist has generated works based on ancient objects assembled into disturbing and enigmatic compositions: the series Hybrids (2018) and Gatekeepers (2020) attempt to reconstitute new objects by “sticking” heterogenous fragments together or by linking them by means of deliberately coarse and conspicuous processes involving blue duct tape or nail-studded foam. The museum object acts up, mating with others as it pleases to better amuse us, scare us, or simply make us wonder.
A THREEFOLD JOURNEY
At the beginning of The Dam, we are immediately disorientated by a very different space, in an approach that might seem descriptive if Ali Cherry’s rhythmic and visual reconfiguration did not suggest that the journey would foremost be a purely sensory event. An intertitle on a black background delivers a mysterious invitation to this journey: “Somewhere on the banks of the Great Nile, in the shadow of a colossal dam, works a man whose life is shaped by mud.” We then enter into the film with a majestic wide shot of a mountain with a road running in front. A tiny motorcycle drives along it, crossing the screen from left to right. The second shot, also static, frames a turn in the road where the vehicle continues its trajectory, this time from the bottom of the screen towards the left, in the midst of a flock of sheep crossing the road. The first motif of the film is that of the trajectory.
The rest of the film is set against the daily life of a traditional brickyard, where a handful of men are busy working close to the Merowe Dam in Sudan. In part, this film presents itself as a documentary with ontological virtues: such is the case of the static shot that shows the suspended moment when the workers bathe in the river, or the one where they watch phone or television screens broadcasting the latest news of the popular uprising against the regime. However, it is as if the filmmaker had to take reality and time by the horns in order to extract their beauty: by fragmenting the workers’ bodies in close-up shots, capturing their hands or feet in the gestures of repetitive work, recording the geometric possibilities proposed by the vertiginous alignment of the bricks. The second motif of the film is that of creation.
One figure stands out amongst the workers: Maher, a rather silent man who seems to sink into contemplation as soon as the opportunity presents itself. At one point, he overlooks his workmates who are relaxing in the water, as if already absorbed by an otherwhere whose nature is unknown but
can be guessed at thanks to the soundtrack, which combines a barely perceptible piece of music with a dull roar. By taking the same route as in the first two shots in the opposite direction, a motorcycle makes it possible to understand that we have already witnessed one of his enigmatic journeys. The drop-off point consists of a sunken space in the middle of the desert, where Maher’s shadow hints at hard work until nightfall around a tall and unidentified shape.
The work in question is not so much architectural as sculptural, and is revealed only later in the film, as if reaching it required a journey for both Maher and the viewer. This journey is foremost physical, reiterated towards a virgin space seemingly at a remove from the world, an open-air workshop which enables the construction of this imposing shape. It is also visual, towards the work: the fragmentary vision of a body that literally breathes and seems to be both cared for and sculpted by Maher’s hands. He patiently applies clay until a kind of golem appears with plant-like eyes and arms, and it is unclear whether they are agitated by a life of their own or by a breath of wind. Finally, this journey is a spiritual one. The character accomplishes it by pursuing a vision which creates a permeability between his dream life and his waking life: a surreally beautiful nocturnal sequence leads the character to move forward in his dark night and to establish a dialogue with the sculpture, which questions him about his wandering and cries milky tears. Overwhelmed, the sculptor also breaks down in tears, before waking up. Later, an accident directly related to the dam, which is guessed rather than seen throughout the story, leads the worker/artist to radically rewrite his place in the world, this time in letters of fire, for want of being able to lastingly preserve its beauty. By capturing beauty as if by accident, by grasping the scattered signs of the song of the world, Ali Cherri becomes the patient archaeologist and inspired storyteller of our elusive and enigmatic present.
1 Silver Lion awarded in 2022 for a collection of monumental sculptures, drawings and videos. 2 Roxanna Azimi, “Faire corps avec la ville,” in Earth, Fire, Water, Dilecta, 2021. Monograph published with the support of CNAP and the Imane Farès gallery.
Jean-Jacques Manzanera is a teacher and a critic. He has collaborated on books about Bruno Dumont, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roman Polanski.
Page de gauche left page: Dead Inside 10. 2021. Diptyque. Aquarelle watercolor. 41,5 x 50 cm chaque each. (Ph. Tadzio).
Cette page, de haut en bas from top: The Digger. 2015. HD vidéo, suround sound. 23 min 36. The Breathless Forest. 2019. Vue d’installation view.
La Vitrine, Beirut Art Residency, Beyrouth