VIENNA.- With his films, sculptures, installations and drawings, Ali Cherri visualizes history and cultural value not as something neutral or universal, but as constructed narratives, deeply influenced by colonialism, nationalism and geopolitics. Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976, a year into the Lebanese Civil War that would continue for fourteen more (1975–1990). During its course, about 120,000 people died and almost one million were forced to leave the country. But Cherri, who was initially trained as a graphic designer, experienced the vibrant heyday of Beirut’s art scene in the 1990s. Thus, not only the conceptual and material engagement with violence, but also the belief in the power of imagination as a political force carries his work.
Mythology and ancient history as well as the afterlife of cultural artefacts play a key role in Cherri’s practice, who sources archaeological relics in auction houses or antiquities markets. “Many of these objects,” the artist explains, “are literally broken or damaged, and I see in this a poetic way to establish solidarity with other broken bodies. Today, we all carry our own fractures and thus seek connection with other beings and communities who share similar experiences, from whom we can learn and with whom we can empathize.” By integrating these fragments into hybrid, creature-like sculptures that radiate a surreal energy, Cherri introduces the forgotten, excluded or suppressed into Western collections. Questioning what is visible, and what remains obscured, his works get to the foundations of Western museums’ practices and their power to shape the official canon and discourse through colonial politics of collecting and contextualizing.
In Cherri’s work, political implications are not only evident on a symbolic level, but also in the choice of artistic materials themselves. He is especially interested in mud, a primordial material of civilization in the production of commodities but also of art and cult objects. Only recently, he has begun to work with bronze, primarily used by ruling classes for monuments of “heroes” that shall manifest the power and dominance of the current regime. By combining these contrasting materials in a new series of works, the artist turns the classical power dynamic upside down: the moisture of the fragile, “inferior” mud aggresses and weakens the “hegemonial,” lasting bronze—a reclamation of power.
Alongside a new installation and a slide-projection dealing with monuments and their dismantling, Secession presents Cherri’s celebrated three-channel video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), for which he was awarded the Silver Lion at the 59th Venice Biennale. He shot this work at the Merowe Dam on the Nile River in Northern Sudan. In the early 2000s, the construction of the largest hydropower plant in Africa led to the displacement of more than 50,000 people, social unrest, the destruction of ecosystems, and the submersion of cultural sites and artifacts. The film follows a group of brickmakers as they shape by hand these fundamental building materials from mud. And again, both destruction and creation go hand in hand, asking: how to build a new world from the mud of the past?
Ali Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976 and lives and works in Paris.
Programmed by the board of the Secession
Curated by Jeanette Pacher
The exhibition has been developed in partnership with Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, where a second, extended chapter will be presented from April 12 – September 21, 2025. In the framework of this collaboration, the partners have co-commissioned new works by the artists.
