Ali Cherri: Dust and Other Anxieties

Blending fact with fiction

Ali Cherri, Dust and Other Anxieties (2013). Courtesy of the artist and Imane Farès Gallery.

With text by Basak Senova, curator.

Ali Cherri mainly works on images by searching what kind of knowledge they produce as sources of historical documentation. In this context, he blends elements of fact and fiction by exploring the links between power structures and their representational implications in the images. His lens-based works address the politics of control, history and identity in a critical tone. Cherri probes into the act of archiving by questioning the diverse perceptions during phases of creating, disturbing, accessing, consuming and decontextualizing images.

In Dust and Other Anxieties, Cherri’s starting point is one of the statues of Hafez Al-Assad that was erected in Lattakia, Syria. Cherri decontextualizes this image by transposing this statue to a desert. We follow a path in history through this image. In Cherri’s words.

“The effigy is almost swallowed by a cloud of dust, similar to one created by a spacecraft in the process of lift-off. Through the haze, we perceive what was once a symbol of authority vanishing in a desolate landscape; it is far removed from the signs of life in the foreground, the recent passage of cars perhaps. The monument is seemingly lost a vast, dusty and claustrophobic post-apocalyptic panorama and is almost forgotten in the background, taking up only a small fraction of the image.”

In Dust and Other Anxieties, the image of Hafez Al Assad has become “a haunting after-image” that appears like a mirage in the midst of a desert. In such an alienated background, this surreal image renders the sequences of memory— extracted from the story of this political figure along with the dominating political power he represented. For Cherri, Dust and Other Anxieties is not a political statement. “It is a projection of a hazy, complex and polarized reality. “It is a poetic disappearance that leaves us anxious about the void it creates.”