Ali Cherri

Confronting systemic violence and the language of violated bodies, 'Corps et âmes' at Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection (through August 25, 2025) features more than one artist whose work has been vandalized (Miriam Cahn, Philip Guston, and David Hammons). François Pinault employs the word tenderness in his introduction to the themes exhibition curator Emma Lavigne draws from a selection of works from his collection. The term speaks to care, for the wounded, for a community or a child, as well as a collector’s care for objects and cultural heritage. Likewise, tenderness recalls suffering; it’s the ache of a bruise, the hollows of loss. In this context, Lebanese sculptor and filmmaker Ali Cherri’s 24 Ghosts per Second, a resurrection of remains, transcends.

Inspired by the 24 glass vitrines that circle the historic rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce (once used to display merchandise destined for the trading floor), Cherri conceives each as a vignette for the 24 images that animate each second of cinema. Inside these tall cases, the artist animates his grafted sculptures (combinations of damaged artifacts and his own carefully hand-crafted completions) with handwritten lines revived from Jean Cocteau’s Le sang d’un poète (1930). The visitor’s circumambulation around the circular passage space completes the united works’ transformation into a sort of zoetrope. Under the building’s luminous dome, encased by Tadao Ando’s concrete cylinder, and still crowned with colonial-era frescos, Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2016) plays on loop. Jafa’s soundtrack, Kanye West’s hypnotic ballad Ultralight Beam, bleeds into Cherri’s silent installation. West’s refrain, "This is a God dream," sings to the phantom space Cherri conjures. 

Cherri clearly remembers the first time he entered a museum, as a 14-year-old on a class field trip to the National Museum of Beirut. Briefly opening its doors following Lebanon’s Civil War, the works on display that day were still inside blocks of concrete, protection from looting and bombs. Cherri speaks of open wounds, in Lebanon, and in contemporary art, and voices a desire to reconstruct objects and histories from the rubble.

I don’t distinguish between human bodies and the material of these sculptures he says.

He speaks about solidarity amongst the broken, mobilizing a sort of sculptural collage. Combining disparate fragments, mediums, and epochs, the artist resuscitates damaged forms.

For the most part, Cherri recuperates the various archeological fragments that he augments with his generous sculptural gesture at auction. Damaged objects, or otherwise left out of the dominant European version of Art History, Cherri reclaims and reimagines. For L’Homme aux larmes, 2023, for example, the artist attached fine silver chains from the sanded eyes of a 15th century stone sculpture. Elevating the blinded, taciturn face on luminous plaster shoulders, the metal filaments flow like tears, pooling in Janus head coins. Granted vision and emotion, the discarded artifact comes alive. 

Cherri’s horned sculpture, The Dreamer, 2023 (made with a Malian mask) stands in the underground Engine Room. Backlit, its silhouette falls on the wall of the space populated with relics of cooling machinery. The shadow echoes the cloaked figure and the patchwork bull in the final scenes of Le sang d’un poète and the work likewise haunts the liminal space of Cocteau’s film.

Today capitalism demands we sleep as little as possible. At the same time our position as witness requires we stay alert. But this is exhausting, unsustainable Cherri explained recently.

Like Cocteau, Cherri summons the phantasmagorical, invoking characters with eyes open halfway in a state of somnolence like that of a waking dream. The power of the imagination to see beyond what is visible is the definition of belief. It’s a state that bridges the hope of dreams with a politically engaged wakefulness to the dangers of the real.