Almine Rech is pleased to announce the representation of Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, in collaboration with Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. The gallery will feature his work at Art Basel in June 2024 and will organize a solo exhibition in New York in 2025.
‘Working with natural materials such as mud in his sculptural practice, Ali Cherri’s work is rooted in ancient art. I was very impressed by this aspect during my first visit to his studio, as artists working with this most elemental media, earth, have been integral to the gallery’s program and history – Picasso, to name only one.
Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo: Boris Camaca
As Stefanie Hessler, Director of the Swiss Institute, describes, ‘From ancient Sumerian mythology to Jewish, Maori and Chinese creation myths to Hindu and Yoruba cosmogony, humankind has time and again been narrativized as originating from mud.’ Another focus of Ali Cherri’s practice involves contemporary media: moving image, film, and video. I admire that his work addresses our world that has always existed and the one of today at the same time: allowing us to simultaneously feel a sense of the eternal and the temporal, which I think is a unique achievement.’
ENVISAGEMENT , Institut Giacometti, 2024
© Succession Alberto Giacometti / ADAGP, Paris 2024
About Ali Cherri
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.
sans rêve , Frac Bretagne, Rennes, 2024
© Ali Cherri, Courtesy of the Artist, Fondazione In
Between art Film
Photo: Aurélien Mole
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.
©2024 Almine Rech
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