Contemporânea

Awarded at the Venice Biennale (2022) and featured at Cannes’s Semaine de la Critique (2026), Paris-based Lebanese artist Ali Cherri has gained international acclaim for his sensitive, unflinching explorations of how the violation of power reverberates through bodies, memories, and historical narratives. On 3 October 2026, he will present The Book of Mud (2025) at Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória in Porto as part of the Contemporânea programme “My Center Is Not in the Solar System.” Telling the story of the memory of mud, this material of creation between earth and water, the musical performance with a recital is a continuation of the artist’s homonymous project from 2018–2020, which comprised a limited-edition artist’s book and artefacts encased in mudbrick.

Considering the material and immaterial impact of political violence, Cherri’s works tell us stories of that which is often overlooked: bodies that cannot escape their roles as soldiers or border guards; bricklayers toiling with no end in sight to the sounds of revolution on their radios; fragments of pillaged archaeological pieces that the artist gently reintroduces into the museum; and the materiality of mud at once as that of creation myths, as an everyday material, and as a site of human labour and more-than-human action. While his work does not shy away from depicting the violence of conflicts, it is rather focused on the subtle, often forgotten traces that violence leaves in its wake in objects and in human psyches. Sensitive, quiet, and atmospheric, his works in film, video, and sculptural installation expand our understanding of the lasting marks of violation and, with that, open up a space for us to imagine other ways of being and relating.

I first heard about Cherri’s work in a very particular context, namely during a debate on artistic expressions of de- and re-monumentalisation related to the destruction of racist memorials in the protests following the murder of George Floyd, when protestors pulled down statues of old slave owners from their plinths. Cherri was an example of an artist whose works interrogate how monuments reflect dominant historical narratives and what potential for reimagining history their framed absence or active removal holds. Speaking to him before his upcoming Porto performance, I discovered that he had been reflecting on the function of memorials since the Arab Spring, when statues associated with authoritarian regimes were being torn down. “I was interested in what the Assad regime did at the end of the uprising in Syria,” Cherri explained to me. “They removed statues of Assad in order for protestors not to destroy them, preferring to take them out themselves rather than have images of these symbols of power destroyed.”2 His explorations culminated in the 2024 installation Toppled Monuments 1–6 (Kharkiv, Aleppo, Baghdad, Richmond VA, Vienna, Bristol), featuring six empty, downsized wooden plinths representing the empty space where deposed leaders once stood. The work highlights the reclaiming of historical narratives by social movements associated with the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter, as well as in post-Soviet countries, where monuments were toppled to make space for imagining a better future.

Cherri often refers to how becoming an artist in post-civil-war Beirut in the 1990s meant being concerned with how the present moment would be remembered in the future, and with how one would like to imagine the future. As such, an examination of historical production and remembrance is a continuous thread in his work, including for example his solo exhibition How I Am Monument (2024–2025) at Secession, Vienna, and the Grafting series (2018–ongoing), which features broken or damaged archaeological artefacts, once pillaged and then bought by the artist at auction, reframed into new sculptures with clay and wood. Reintroducing these hybrid found-and-made sculptures into the museum space, from which their history had been excluded, Cherri questions how the histories of objects are imagined and remembered, which are preserved, and by whom, and suggests a material solidarity with other, non-human, broken bodies.3

Thinking about monumentalisation through materiality, Cherri began to investigate two opposite materials: bronze and mud. “For me, this is an encounter between two modes of producing history: bronze, which is long-lasting and represents top-down history; and mud, which functions from the bottom-up. While unstable and porous, mud can corrode bronze, weakening it and making it fall down over time,” the artist explains. With bronze statues being the prerogative of dominant culture, the qualities of these materials mean that mud, as a material, “could take care of reversing this process [of producing history].”4 Important is also the materiality of mud as a substance through which humanity has imagined other worlds, the beginning of all creation myths—a theme that came to form the basis of The Book of Mud (Dangola Limited Editions, Beirut, 2018–2020).

Materiality is one of the ways in which Cherri explores pivotal moments of societal imagination, wherein mud has turned out to be a particularly potent material for exploration. “I became interested in mud during a period of research in Northern Sudan, close to the Merowe Dam [on the Nile’s Fourth Cataract], by watching brickmakers work,” he tells me when I enquire about the beginning of his many years of exploring this material. “They extract earth from the riverbank, mix it with water, and turn it into bricks through repetitive and exhausting labour. So, for me, mud is not only connected to creation myths: it is also an everyday material tied to bodies, labour, the river, and a particular economy.”5 This research by the Merowe Dam led the artist to the feature film The Dam (Al-Sadd, 84’, 2022), the third in the Telluric Trilogy on geographies of violence, as well as the three-channel video Of Men and Gods and Mud (18’40’’, 2022) which featured excerpts from The Book of Mud.

These two works were created during and in the direct aftermath of the Sudanese revolution (2018–2019), in a context of political violence and ecological disaster. The Merowe Dam is the continent’s largest and probably most destructive hydropower project. Its construction in the 2000s forcibly displaced over 50,000 people from the Manasir, Hamadab and Amri tribes while submerging 180 km² of ancient historical sites, destroying date palm groves that sustained the local population, eroding riverbanks downstream and severely damaging the fragile ecosystem that made the Nile’s shores an oasis of fertility in the desert.6

Cherri’s The Dam approaches this violation of bodies, archaeology, and ecology through a subtle material psychology that makes his work so unique. The film follows Maher’s daily life as a worker at a traditional brickyard, often to the sounds of news broadcasts reporting on the Sudanese revolution, with former president Omar al-Bashir being ousted, a military council taking over the country’s leadership, street protests, rising prices, and dead bodies floating in the Nile. While the society around him is undergoing drastic change, Maher’s reality remains the same as he labours day in and day out. However, in him, too, something is changing. Every evening, he secretly leaves for the desert to work on a mysterious mud sculpture which seems to melt away every time the dam is filled. The porous, unstable materiality of mud is contrasted with the permanent, dominating materiality of the dam. “Maher’s secret construction emerges from this tension. I would not describe it simply as an image of liberation,” Cherri tells me. “It absorbs his labour, his anger, his desire and his imagination until it becomes something that exceeds him.”7 At the end of the film, Maher’s construction has begun to speak to him, and we see him swimming in the water of the dam reservoir, where initially he would refuse to go.

In Of Men and Gods and Mud, Cherri moves away from Maher’s story “towards the collective gestures of the brickmakers, placing their labour in dialogue with creation stories in which human beings are formed from earth or clay.”8 The video shows the brickyard workers making bricks, resting, watching TV, cooking, walking, swimming in the Nile, burning the bricks. It is an embodied materiality of mud set against recitals in Arabic and English from The Book of Mud, the project through which Cherri took this research beyond Sudan in a grand storytelling that unites the scientific and the spiritual:

Cherri tells me how mud became “the starting point for different stories, songs, and fragments, carried through voices and music. Over these four years [2018–2022], it has moved in my work from a material rooted in a specific landscape [by the Merowe Dam] and form of labour to a way of thinking about bodies, myths, and history. What continues to interest me is its instability, and how mud retains traces without fixing them permanently. It can become a brick, a shelter, a body, or a monster, but none of these forms is ever definitive. … I’m still exploring it; I think it’s a material that will stay with me for a long time.”9

On 3 October 2026, Ali Cherri will present The Book of Mud as a musical performance with a recital, concluding the “My Center Is Not in the Solar System” programme at Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória, Porto. The programme is curated by Alexandra Balona and is part of Contemporânea’s larger project On Hybridity and the Poetics of Resistance, under the artistic direction of Celina Brás. The evening will also feature I Killed the Bird (2026) by Shahd Wadi and James Newitt, and Nothing Will Remain Other Than the Thorn Lodged in the Throat of this World (2025) by Noor Abed and Haig Aivazian.

Ali Cherri