At GAMeC in Bergamo, the largest exhibition on Ali Cherri's multimedia practice

From Oct. 8, 2023 to Jan. 14, 2024, GAMeC - Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Bergamo will host Dreamless Night, the solo exhibition of Lebanese artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri (Beirut, 1976), winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Art Biennale 2022. The exhibition, organized together with Fondazione In Between Art Film and with Frac Bretagne in Rennes, will move to Rennes after its first stop in Bergamo and will be the most extensive presentation to date of Ali Cherri’s multimedia practice, which includes films, video installations, drawings and sculptures.

Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, Artistic Director and Curator of Fondazione In Between Art Film, respectively, Dreamless Night is the first exhibition project launched as part of Unison, a new two-year initiative promoted by the Foundation to commission and produce exhibitions dedicated to moving images in collaboration with Italian and international public institutions.

GAMeC’s Spazio Zero will host The Watchman (2023), a new video work by the artist commissioned and produced by the Foundation, which will be presented on this occasion in the form of a large-scale video installation. Set in Louroujina, a small village in the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the film centers on the figure of a soldier guarding the southern border with the recognized Republic of Cyprus under Greek Cypriot authority. In his prolonged and tedious shifts, the hills inhabited by the “enemy” become the site of his fantasies and reveries. The Watchman continues the artist’s critical inquiry into the politics of borders, the construction of nationality, and the radical potential of imagination. Ali Cherri also evokes the historical connections of migration between Cyprus and Lebanon, as well as those between Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and his native Beirut, also divided during the Lebanese civil war.

The halls of GAMeC will also feature previously unseen sculptures and drawings by the artist, created especially for the exhibition, which relate to the symbolic elements and characters of the film, as well as the geographical and cultural landscape of Cyprus.

The artist’s practice aims to bring to light the visible and invisible forms of violence inscribed in the landscape to metaphorically address the dimensions of political, socio-economic and cultural violence belonging to its history. Ali Cherri’s art aims to pose urgent questions about the possibilities of representing traumatic and hostile events in novel ways, while unleashing the emancipatory potential of the imagination. In particular, oscillating between the documentary and poetic genres, his films scrutinize the features of vast landscapes to make tangible how history penetrates the geological and geographical dimensions: from the layers of rock found in a Neolithic necropolis in the United Arab Emirates(The Digger, 2015), to the mud near the controversial Merowe Dam in northern Sudan(The Dam, 2022), to the active fault lines that run through Lebanon(The Disquiet, 2013). This aspect of his poetics finds a counterbalance in the artist’s research in the fields of archaeology, cultural heritage and conservation, as well as in the related politics of classification, dislocation and display. In this sense, landscapes, bodies and ancient artifacts are simultaneously presented as witnesses to forms of destruction and tools for imagining the past and present differently.

The Dreamless Night exhibition will be accompanied by a monographic catalog edited by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, published by Lenz Press. The volume, which will be published on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition at Frac Bretagne, will include photographic documentation of the exhibition at GAMeC and specially commissioned essays focusing on Ali Cherri’s multimedia practice, with a particular focus on recent exhibitions and projects, such as his participation in the 2022 Venice Art Biennale and the National Gallery commission in London the same year. Exhibition and catalog are also made possible thanks to the support of Galerie Imane Farès. The Watchman has received additional support from the Robert Matta - Fondation RAM.

Pictured is a still from The Watchman.

At GAMeC in Bergamo, the largest exhibition on Ali Cherri's multimedia practice

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