Ali Cherri — Bad Bad Images — Imane Farès Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 25, 2011 → February 28, 2012

Ugly, images, nasty images; images that are vicious, mean, defective, inappropriate, incorrect, dangerous, immoral and predominantly violent.

But above all, images that are produced.

How to step out of that duality that pits the images of the oppressed versus the images of the oppressor ?

Bad Bad Images tries to highlight violence without attempting to stage or reconfigure it.It tries rather to expose it, trying to go beyond the event itself in order to measure its effects.

The research territory for this project extends from Beirut, in its constant state of war, to Sao Paulo, a city that beats to the rhythm of urban tensions, passing through Syria, where the protesters have managed to turn their bad images into a singular event in itself. Indeed, in so doing, they know that they are in effect documenting their own deaths.

This quest also leads to territories that proclaim themselves purified of violence, such as Abu Dhabi and its invented islands (Saadiyat, Yas), seeking to expose another form of brutality, that of latent violence.

Bad Bad Images questions above all the possibility or impossibility of representing violence. The flow of these raw images, holding back no secrets, revealing everything, negate any time that might be spent on reflection.

These are visceral images.

The screen has obliterated the distance between the event, the image and its perception, deconstructing these images to separate them from their contexts and reducing them to their elemental component: the pixel. And through this poetic transfer, they are then redrawn to create an artwork.

By creating a void in these images, I am trying to free them from their perception as fragments of reality, trying to create a space through which the imagination might enter.

Such imaginary queries have certainly been referenced before in the history of painting. But one will always find what one is looking to see.

By presenting them as such, these images do not lose their political slant. They might even earn back their greatest strength: the power to move.

This is the essential quality of bad images.