Le songe d'une nuit sans rêve

Le songe d’une nuit sans rêve (Dreamless Night) is the first solo exhibition by Ali Cherri, a Lebanese artist living in Paris, in an art institution in France.

The exhibition presents the new video work The Watchman (2023), as well as a series of original sculptures and drawings, specially produced for the exhibition, which relate to the symbolic elements and characters of the film, as well as to the geographical and cultural landscape of Cyprus. Shot in Louroujina, a small village in the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the film centers on the figure of a soldier who guards the southern border with the Greek-Cypriot-dominated Republic of Cyprus. During his long and tedious guards, the hills inhabited by the “enemy” become the scene of the soldier’s fantasies and daydreams. The Watchman continues Ali Cherri’s critical investigation of border politics, geographies of violence, nation-building and the radical potential of the imagination. The artist also evokes the historical links of migration between Cyprus and Lebanon, as well as those between Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and Beirut, the artist’s hometown, which was also divided during the Lebanese Civil War.

Curators: Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi.