Ali Cherri
My Pain Is Real | 2010
3 channel video installation. 5:30 min. Ed.1/5 (+ 2 AP)
In his work Cherri presents us with a self-portrait video in which a computer cursor moves across the screen over the image leaving scratches and bruises on the artist’s face. At surface value, the cursor is either seen as a tool for applying make-up, or as a knife that defaces the artist’s face. With a second reading the cursor becomes a distancing device, the trace of a process within a digital practice, like a reminder of the skin of an image in digital times.
Between the first reading and the second is a major shift in thew understanding of an artwork, once engaging in formal interpretation, and once in creative critical distance, and therefore discourse.
Reference AC-VVI-2010-A
Biography of the artist
Born in Beirut, Lebanon. 1976
Works and Lives in Beirut and Paris
Ali Cherri is a video and visual artist based in Beirut and Paris. He is currently conducting a research with the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) and the Deutsche Aarchäologische Institut (DAI) on the place of the archeological object in the construction of national historical narratives.
In his videos, drawings and sculptural installations, Ali Cherri dissects the geopolitical situation in Lebanon and its neighbouring countries with a distanced as well as involved look. Fragile basements and a history of earthquakes in the region seem to reflect the perpetual crises. Digital manipulations create an intense and distressing confusion between the real and the virtual. Cherri seeks new perspectives, different points of analysis between fall and rise, archaeology and the conquest of space – from Pipe Dreams to Bird’s Eye View.
His recent exhibitions includes Desires and Necessities at MACBA (Spain, 2015), Lest the Two Seas Meet at Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (Poland 2015), Mare Medi Terra at Es Baluard Museu d’Art Modern i Contemporani de Palma (Spain, 2015), Songs of Loss and Songs of Love at Gwangju Museum of Art (South Korea, 2014).
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