The winner of a prize at the 18th Festival, the Lebanese artist discusses the use of archival footage in his video installation Pipe Dreams, composed of two screens. The first one shows footage of the second and last Arab ever sent to space, the member of a mission on board a Soviet space shuttle. The artist recounts his surprise upon seeing the astronaut speaking live with then-Syrian president Hafez Al Assad like a child addressing his father, or a student listening to a professor. The second screen shows Syrian government teams removing the leader’s statues in order to protect them from rebels’ attacks, which caught Cherri’s eye for the unusual strategy employed by the government to conserve and maintain the regime. According to him, the political character inherent to image can be detected in both. He also touches on the presence of violence in his work, on the memory of civil war in Lebanon as part of his childhood, and on the memory contained in the body. Finally, he discloses a few aspects of his work-in-progress, which deals with earthquakes and the metaphor that they naturally carry.
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