Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The fictionalization of memory, the recurrence of death, and the preponderance of text characterize the work of Ali Cherri (born in Beirut, 1976), a young member of the 1990s generation of Lebanese artists. Cherri's work is rooted in the peculiar type of domestic prison that the lengthy Lebanese civil war (1974-1991) forced Beirut citizens into, in the subsequent encounter with body and fantasy that he described in Un Cercle autour du Soleil (2005), and in the nearness of an absent city, transformed by the conflict into a “nonplace,” a tangled web of nameless streets, a metropolis/necropolis. “War exposes the link between personal experience and history,” says the artist. A need to communicate elements of the war experience is the driving force behind Ali Cherri's personal narratives-which, more than just memories, are about “making things up, in order to understand.” 

The narratives are built upon a fascination for mystery stories-particularly about “the detective that goes looking for a missing clue, or a missing body”-, which were one of Cherri's first encounters with art through literature. Detective stories remain a hidden reference in works such as Un Cercle autour du Soleil and As Dead as Ever (2001), were the theme of one of Cherri's first projects, an interactive game about a murder in a library, and reappeared in his first foray into performance, Nothing New Under the Sun (2000), based on tales of murder by Sartre and Mishima. 

Around the time of that performance, Ali Cherri earned a Graphic Design degree from the American University in Beirut-and, as of today, still works as a professional graphic designer. Prior to that, working as an actor, Cherri became close friends with Lina Saneh, theater actress and director, with whom he did Ovrira in 1997 (in 2003, he returned to acting in Ramad, a film by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige). In 2001, Cherri moved to Amsterdam and entered the Performing Arts graduate course at DasArts (Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance Studies), inaugurating a fundamental period for the maturation of his artistic vision.

Cherri's first work in the Netherlands, As Dead as Ever - Topologies of a Death Circuit (2001-2002), explored the city of Amsterdam by building a private map using addresses of dead people, found in local obituaries. The graphic image of “a bunch of lines, shapes, letters, and numbers”-reminiscent of the mapless city, demarcated by death, where Cherri spent his childhood and adolescence-becomes reality as he walks by a series of closed doors, all the while doing video recordings in “an obsessive attempt to turn absence into presence.” 

During the performance-lecture in which he explains his project, Cherri builds an ironically naturalistic character: a performer who is as cold as a lecturer in order to communicate something that is not only fictional, but also disturbingly subjective. With no props whatsoever, the performance highlights the density of the text and the maturity of the artist's references, features that connect Cherri's work with experiments made by prominent artists of the generation immediately previous to his, such as Jalal Toufic and Walid Raad, founder of the Atlas Group. 

The format grew more mature with the performance Give Me a Body Then (2005), where Cherri projects a random collection of photographs and builds a narrative around them; the narrative starts out in a confessional mood-as he speaks of his obsession with images of naked or dead people-, and then takes a surprising twist, turning into a horror story that adds an ironic twist (although not a dismissive one) to the fatal eroticism of the image. The work, presented at the Diskurs - Festival for Young Performing Arts, Germany, and at the Home Works III Forum, promoted by the Ashkal Alwan - Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, in Beirut (2005), is preceded by a screening, repeated ad nauseam, of the image of a man who tries to fly while wearing a huge pair of wings.

More than just an accessory, video is a part of the experiment that Cherri uses as raw material for his performances. Curiously enough, the two stage sets he designed for Lebanese artists during his sojourn in Amsterdam are closely related to video. In Biokhraphia (2002), a theater show by Rabih Mroué and Lina Saneh that was presented in Europe and Asia, Cherri drew a frame that turned into a screen, sometimes showing the face of an actress who answered questions about the role of artists and other times hiding her behind a smoke screen, or else her own projected image. In 10/20 Irrelevant (2003), by Abla Khoury, presented at the DisORIENTation Festival in the House of World Cultures, in Berlin, Cherri's stage design enabled Khoury to share the stage with the images of New York-based Lebanese people who talked about their own “American dreams.” 

Cherri made his first installation involving video, created in partnership with Guy Amitai at the DasArts, in the same year. Alluding to the classic horror movie The Shining (1980), directed by Stanley Kubrick, and to the history of the building itself-before housing DasArts, it used to be a school for children with respiratory problems-, the work is comprised of interventions and images of huge children marching on but not moving forward, projected onto the windows. RedRum attempts to create a link between the school that exists nowadays, and its memories of death and suffering, making room for the “ghosts of the past” at the present time.

The intention is identical to Cherri's description of his video Un Cercle autour du Soleil (2005): “Nowadays, perhaps only the dead have a home to go back to in Beirut. We citizens of Beirut can only hope to be accepted among them, and thus be able to inhabit our city again.” Despite the ruins that surround the area of Beirut that he depicts, Cherri composes his most articulate war account in video, talking about how he used to feel safe under the blanket during the bombings, and about the discovery of his own body-which he claims is too fragile and ugly to deserve a tragic death during the war-and confides that he felt disappointed upon hearing news of the end of the conflict. “I was fond of the idea of living in a city that was eating itself up, just as gastric juice in excess digests and, gradually, eats away at your stomach,” according to Cherri's text. 

In addition to being awarded the FAAP Digital Arts Prize at the 15th Videobrasil, Un Cercle autour du Soleil was presented at the Home Works III Forum, Beirut-an event for which Cherri has already drawn two publications-, and then went on a tour of festivals through the Netherlands, France, and Germany. Cherri has recently inaugurated, at Galerie Sfeir-Semler, in the capital city of Lebanon, the installation I Feel a Great Desire to Meet the Masses Once Again, done in collaboration with Rabih Mroué, for whom he had already created the ironic photomontages of Limp Bodies (2003). The installation reproduces images of body art performances by artists such as Bruce Nauman, Yves Klein, and Vito Acconci, superimposed onto pictures of a demonstration that gathered one million people in Lebanon, after the murder of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in March 2005. The goal is to study the relationship between the body and the crowd, the cause and the individual. Or as Cherri puts it: “Do we have a face when we are part of a million other faces?”