Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.
review

Examining the material’s history. An exhibition at Secession. Ali Cherri, mud, and bronze as a metaphor of violence.

Can a monument truly speak about its times? How does it oppress people? Can a monument mirror suffering and violence? Their role and the way they mirror are at the centre of How I Am Monument, Ali Cherri’s exceptional solo show in Vienna developed in partnership with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and curated by Jeanette Pacher. 

Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, who experienced the vibrant heyday of Beirut’s art scene in the 90s but was born during the civil war, reflects on historic recurrences and political oppression. Moving images and sculptures are displayed in the Secession building, an exhibition where space serves as an extension of the screen, and the artist engages with the space itself, exploring different civilisations and belief systems. Mesopotamia, Egypt, contemporary dictatorships, and Middle East conflict are seen through the lenses of monuments and reflecting on their role. Cherri often uses mud, a material that embodies history from the ground up, a primordial material of civilisation in the production of commodities but also of art and cult objects. 

Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.

“Throughout human history, mud – earth and water combined – has been a medium through which creation and life are imagined. From the golems of Jewish folklore to the biblical creation of Adam, or Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, mud has often represented humanity’s capacity to envision alternative worlds, new possibilities, and different lives”, the artist declares. 

And this choice makes his compositions particularly charming. His powerful and original research in terms of materials and concepts led to his works being included in various European and US public collections, like the British Museum, the Musée national d’Art moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Centre national des arts plastiques, among others.

Throughout human history, mud – earth and water combined – has been a medium through which creation and life are imagined. From the golems of Jewish folklore to the biblical creation of Adam, or Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh, mud has often represented humanity’s capacity to envision alternative worlds, new possibilities, and different lives.
— Ali Cherri

The roots of the past

Mythology and ancient history are the main focuses of Cherri’s artistic practice, a way to pay homage to the many centuries of history that underpin Lebanon, his home country. But this inquiry is linked to the interest in the afterlife of cultural artefacts, which people can find in auction houses or antiquities markets, often broken or seriously damaged. As Cherri himself explains, this is “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 empathise”.

Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.

A metaphor to interrogate the ways through which political violence disseminates into people’s bodies and the physical and cultural landscape. The questions, which lately represent a poignant topic, considering the escalation that took place in the Israeli-Arab conflict and the fact Cherri’s parents themselves died under an Israeli bombing in Beirut last December. “Those who don’t know where they are, don’t know who they are”. This sentence is taken from A Beautiful November (1969), one of the most inspired movies by Italian director Mauro Bolognini, explaining how even the monumental heritage contributes to building civil conscience. By destroying it, together with the spiritual heritage, the memory of the people is destroyed, and those people are made permeable and defenceless against any new doctrine or lifestyle imposed from outside or from above.

Since propaganda uses history and archaeology as powerful political tools, often distorting their real meaning, making historical sites seen as part of the apparatus of oppression, it also happens that these sites are destroyed by people during a revolution.

Where I combine bronze and mud. I’m introducing bronze into these new sculptures, and once again, I’m examining the material’s history.
— Ali Cherri

Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.

The phantom of freedom

But paradoxically, there is a moment where eradicating monuments demonstrates that freedom and democracy have returned. After a dictatorship has fallen, people destroy those symbols of the power which oppressed them until the day before. And the monuments of propaganda are among those symbols. The new slide projection, A Monument to Subtle Rot (2024), functions like a soundtrack to the exhibition. Here, text images of a poetic reflection by Palestinian novelist Karim Kattan on the nature of monuments are interspersed with pictures of their dismantling. The text is treated as an image, becoming part of the visual experience. Sometimes, it seems as if the words were voiced by the monuments and then again, they appear to be an observer’s voice – or ours.

After the fall of Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the uprisings in Tunisia, we saw statues of these leaders being torn down – powerful symbols that the people had reached a point of no return. The past and future of people and things, in different forms, as well as the destiny of nations through the lenses of historic recurrences. Every regime’s action reflects a deeper awareness of how images function in political power, and that’s the core of what the artist is trying to interrogate now, using the lenses of mythology and ancient history in a satiric and metaphoric way, and invites reflection on how regimes construct and control their image.

Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl

Recalling totalitarian art nouveau

“Where I combine bronze and mud. I’m introducing bronze into these new sculptures, and once again, I’m examining the material’s history”, Cherri declares. A dialogue similar to Socrates ars maieutica, “provoking” a response from sculpture through a process that “stimulates” tools and materials to react, to question themselves in front of the observer. In this way, sculpture becomes an expressive means of philosophical scope and reaffirms the power of the human intellect with its combination of thought and artisan skills. But the way Cherri reinterprets mythology and ancient history in the form of sculpture, closely recalls the expressive power of the classicist caryatids that adorn the facades of many buildings of the late Northern European Art Nouveau. 

They are imbued with that sense of anguish that was experienced in Europe in the 1930s, stuck between the threat of war and the nightmare of totalitarianism. Lights and shadows come together on the surface of these monumental sculptures, creating a sort of second sculpture that dialogues with the first, doubling its expressiveness and dynamism. Because Cherri approaches sculpture with a cinematic mindset, which provides a very dynamic effect. For example, the Sphinx appears as a monster in a half-human/half-animal body, looking around with a menacing gaze, ready to destroy everything it might meet in its path. On the other hand, there is an aim of satirical interpretation of fascist and nazi monuments, oppressive male figures, often paired with aggressive animals, reflecting a visual language of power that the artist aims to deconstruct. 

Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl (6)
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.

A piece of hope

An exhibition that talks about violence against bodies, objects or nature in regions of conflict and reflects on the way this violence imbues these landscapes, bodies, and objects. But violence has many faces – not only the one coming from war, but also the one operated in the name of “progress”, that destroys landscapes and human settlements as well. From this point of view, one of the hotspots in the exhibition is the three-channel video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), for which Cherri was awarded the Silver Lion at the 59th Venice Biennale. 

The work was shot 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 artefacts. The dam serves as a tool of the oppressive regime of Omar al-Bashir. While it also illustrates a broader tendency to control nature – manipulating water flow for energy, regulating access to water, and ultimately shaping people’s lives and trajectories. The film follows a group of brickmakers as they shape these bricks by hand from mud, asking how people can build a new world from the dust of the past. But the bricks of society are workers and peasants, those people whom Rolling Stones celebrated in 1968 through the song Salt of the Earth; freedom and progressive social movement very often emerge from those “humble” layers of society, made of people of goodwill who believe in equality and social justice. And their will is stronger than oppression, stronger than violence, stronger than propaganda. Cherri’s work celebrates those people – in Sudan and everywhere in the world.

Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.
Ali Cherri, How I Am Monument, installation view, Secession 2024, photo Sophie Pölzl.

So, this is not an exhibition that surrenders to violence. There is a powerful sign of hope that stands in the middle of Secession’s foyer – it is Tree of Life (2024), formally connected to a relief from the Sargon Palace in Mesopotamia (24th–23rd century BCE) from the Louvre, and is Cherri’s first work made in bronze. Appearing in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and the Quran, the tree of life functions as a hopeful symbol of liveliness and creation in the name of freedom and equality.

How I Am Monument is on view until February 23rd, 2025.

About The Author

Niccolò Lucarelli

Niccolò
Lucarelli

Niccolò Lucarelli holds a degree in International Studies but also has a background in the arts and academia. He works as an art critic for esteemed European publications. His curatorial research is primarily dedicated to exploring the influence of socio-political subjects on artistic practices. He keenly examines how artists engage with and respond to these themes, resulting in thought-provoking exhibitions and projects. He has curated shows in Italy, Euorpe and Africa. He also works as a military historian for the Italian Army General Staff and has published some essays and books on World War I and II.

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