Ali Cherri — On things that move — Imane Farès Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 16 → March 22, 2014

Two years after his first presentation at the gallery in the exhibition Bad Bad Images, Ali Cherri this time focuses on trembling landscapes and considers how an archaeology of a catastrophe could offer a relevant political analysis of a location.

Ali Cherri belongs to a generation of artists who make use of video, of archival images and found footage to counter-act the violence of images distributed through the social and mass media, which in the 21st century, more than ever, construct perceptions, sensibilities and opinions. Preoccupied by the geopolitical situation of the place where he was born and its conflict-driven neighbours, Lebanon and surrounding countries of the Middle East, the artist incessantly investigates new visual language that could formulate the (im)possibility of finding some political stability within it.

By looking at the production of the contemporaneous moment as a scientific fact, researching in archives and following the automated labour of seismographs, Cherri ponders how to deal with the troubled territories. The decision to address a particular political situation from the viewpoint of geology is no longer a mere metaphor or metonymy. Out of it emerges a daily struggle to find forms of survival facing the disaster and its inevitability. Beirut, Teheran or Damascus, as well as other cities which are dense with tensions, lie above the crossroads of many fault lines that are giving shape to a high potential of earthquakes. In aesthetic terms, the artist draws analogies between the devastation occurring after a natural tragedy and the visual clichés of ruins caused by wars, since a rupture instigated by a disaster also provides an irretrievable caesura in language.

Ali Cherri was recently featured as part of the 21st-Century avant-garde in the book “Art Cities of the Future” (Phaidon Press).