Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The mud and bronze from which the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri sculpts his latest creations are freighted with history, memory and trauma, but alive with the possibilities of imaginative rebirth. \u201cSphinx\u201d (2024), a winged creature on its haunches with leonine musculature and a human face, borrows from fascist iconography while evoking ancient Assyria and Egypt. Yet this imperious hybrid made of mud totters on metallic-green claws.For Cherri, bronze embodies \u201ctop-down history; we\u2019re used to seeing male heroes in bronze\u201d, whereas mud is a \u201ctime capsule\u201d of history from below. The bronze claws might seem \u201csolid, durable\u201d, he says, \u201cbut mud with its humidity can infiltrate bronze and start rotting it. It\u2019s a poetic way to show how power could be toppled.\u201d\u201cSphinx\u201d and other new sculptural works are on show from April 12 in How I Am Monument, the Paris-based artist\u2019s first major institutional show in the UK, at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. \u201cOf Men and Gods and Mud\u201d, a video installation for which he won the Silver Lion for best emerging artist at the Venice Biennale in 2022, is among recent works in the show. It follows mud-brick makers (played by themselves) near northern Sudan\u2019s Merowe dam, as women narrate creation myths in which clay births life. While it might resemble documentary, Cherri\u2019s work crosses freely into flights of the imagination.\u201cI\u2019m first a moving image person,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s how I build my thoughts.\u201d Yet he constructs sculptural installations \u201clike a movie set \u2014 directing the gaze, and what the audience sees first, with light, shadow, drama\u201d. His oeuvre ranges from the feature film The Dam (2022), set during the 2019 Sudanese uprising, and performances such as \u201cMy Pain is Real\u201d (2010) \u2014 a video installation made after the 2006 Lebanon war in which witnessing others\u2019 pain bruises his own face \u2014 to delicate watercolours of birds or prickly pear cacti, found like barbed wire along militarised borders.Though he has lived in Paris for more than 10 years, and moved there to be with a partner, Cherri returns every two months to Beirut, \u201cmy centre of gravity, my home\u201d. From this point zero, he roams to explore \u201cgeographies of violence\u201d \u2014 the invisible scars and indelible traces left by political violence on artefacts, bodies and landscapes. \u201cThe wound comes back in my work,\u201d he says. \u201cHow you treat these marks of violent history.\u201dThe Baltic show expands an exhibition at Secession in Vienna, whose opening last December the artist missed, owing to the shocking deaths of his parents \u2014 civilian casualties of an Israeli drone strike in Beirut on November 26, hours before a ceasefire in the Israel-Hizbollah war. (Although, Cherri confirms, a Lebanese newspaper erroneously reported that the artist\u2019s parents were related to the target \u2014 an MP of the same surname \u2014 the paper corrected this error.)When we meet in his third-floor studio in Pantin, a north-eastern suburb of Paris popular with artists, Cherri declines to speak about the shattering events. But he tells me his mother was a kindergarten teacher and his father a textile merchant, recalling that his grandfather\u2019s textile shop had closed down during the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90.Born one year into that war, and growing up in Mazraa, in west Beirut of the riven city Cherri, now 48,says wartime experience shaped an abiding concern: \u201cIs it possible to produce historical narrative after trauma?\u201d A fascination with archaeology grew from visiting Lebanon\u2019s National Museum on Beirut\u2019s Green Line, itself a \u201csite of conflict, empty, with a few cement cases\u201d, in which statues and sarcophagi had been entombed to shield them from snipers and shelling. He realised that a \u201ckey element in writing history is how violence affects the construction of stories\u201d.Studying graphic design at the American University of Beirut, and performing arts in Amsterdam, his induction into the art world came through postwar Beirut\u2019s artistic renaissance, among artists such as Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad, Lina Majdalanie and Rabih Mrou\u00e9: \u201cI\u2019d play in films, design books, do stage and set design.\u201d That older generation\u2019s focus on archives questioned \u201cwho has the authority, who has the power of writing history\u201d. In Lebanon, \u201cthe war had no winners or losers; it finished with a general amnesty, so the narrative was suspended: the war\u2019s over; let\u2019s rebuild from a blank page.\u201d This blanking of the past was a \u201cbig problem\u201d. The failure to wrestle with, or agree on, history left artists free, but without institutions.Cherri has since trained a quizzical eye on museums as instruments by which the powerful impose their view of history. In the short \u201cSomniculus\u201d (2017), he was filmed in light sleep and wandering with a torch in the Mus\u00e9e du Quai Branly and other ethnographic collections in Paris. His 2022 exhibition after a residency at the National Gallery in London, If you prick us, do we not bleed?, probed the institutional forgetting of acts of political vandalism against famous paintings, such as the suffragette slashing of Vel\u00e1zquez\u2019s \u201cRokeby Venus\u201d.Les Veilleurs (\u201cThe Gatekeepers\u201d), a solo show to open on June 6 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille, explodes the divide between natural history and art. Totem-pole \u201cassemblages\u201d, recalling objects from a pre-Enlightenment wunderkammer, incorporate stuffed animals and archaeological relics acquired at auction houses in Paris into his own creations. His aim with such \u201cchimera sculptures\u201d is to embrace \u201cobjects left out of the dominant history of museums because they\u2019re dubious or too broken. I\u2019m very impulsive \u2014\u00a0I choose objects for aesthetic reasons.\u201d Infiltrating them into museums, \u201cI consider myself a smuggler, bringing them back as intruders.\u201d Making no distinction between fake and authentic, he \u201cgrafts species\u201d together like a surgeon or botanist, hoping to \u201cmerge and create new life\u201d. Though this grafting might recall Japanese kintsugi, Cherri demurs: \u201cI don\u2019t practise repair. I think there\u2019s no turning back on this violence.\u201d Nor does he urge restitution for colonial wrongs: \u201cThese stories have to be taken into account but can\u2019t be reversed.\u201dHis latest work at Baltic foregrounds monuments, \u201canother form of storytelling\u201d. The exhibition title is a line by the francophone Palestinian novelist Karim Kattan, whose text from the perspective of a statue alternates with images of tumbling icons, in the slide projection \u201cA Monument to Subtle Rot\u201d (2024). \u201cToppled Monuments 1-6\u201d (2004) alludes to deposed leaders, from Baghdad to Bristol, through empty plinths, reflecting, Cherri says, on \u201cwhat stays and what vanishes\u201d.Though he has not set a film in Lebanon since 2013, he feels himself circling back. His short \u201cThe Watchman\u201d (2023), also at Baltic, shows a young soldier guarding the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as he hallucinates a spectral enemy. \u201cCyprus was always an echo chamber of what happens in Lebanon,\u201d Cherri says. \u201cNicosia is still a divided city. The Port of Beirut explosion [in 2020] was heard in Cyprus.\u201d It can, he reflects, be \u201ceasier to look at the pain of others\u201d, though his question is always, \u201cWhat can representation do to a place of constant disaster?\u201dHis own answer might lie in the resilient belief that his \u201cconstellations\u201d of objects \u201ccreate a community of broken bodies, a solidarity in stories of violence\u201d. For him, \u201cI make no distinction between our bodies and others. These fragmented, violated objects can teach us about ourselves.\u201d\u2018How I Am Monument\u2019, April 12-October 12, baltic.art; \u2018Les Veilleurs\u2019, June 6-January 4 2026, musees.marseille.fr<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The mud and bronze from which the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri sculpts his latest creations are freighted with history, memory and trauma, but alive with the possibilities of imaginative rebirth. \u201cSphinx\u201d (2024), a winged creature on its haunches with leonine musculature and a human<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":269060,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-269059","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269061,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269059\/revisions\/269061"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}