ALI CHERRI, ‘Dreams of a Dreamless Night’
DREAMS OF A DREAMLESS NIGHT
Size: 21 x 28 cm
Pages: 192
Published by Lenz, 2024
The publication is the first institutional monograph on the multimedia practice of artist and director Ali Cherri. It aims to highlight the constellation of ideas, themes, and formal concerns running through his most recent, highly significant projects.
Edited by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, with Bianca Stoppani, this book provides an overview of the artist's output over the past three years, teasing out both new strands for interpretation and formal links between his films, videos, sculptures, drawings, and installations.
Originated by Fondazione In Between Art Film on the occasion of Dreamless Night—a comprehensive solo exhibition first staged at GAMeC in Bergamo, and later at Frac Bretagne in Rennes—the book showcases a number of newly commissioned essays that reflect upon Cherri's most recent exhibition projects. Starting with the documenting of Dreamless Night, the book also covers Humble and quiet and soothing as mud, the 2023 exhibition at Swiss Institute in New York; his participation at Biennale Arte 2022 in Venice; and If you prick us, do we not bleed?, the exhibition held at the National Gallery in London following his residency at the museum in 2021. Each exhibition is also extensively illustrated by a visual essay conceived by the artist, encompassing not only the installation views but also images charting the development and production stages.
The book features a wide-ranging conversation between the artist, GAMeC director Lorenzo Giusti, and Étienne Bernard, director of Frac Bretagne, as well as essays by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, curators of the exhibition Dreamless Night at GAMeC, and at Frac Bretagne; Cecilia Alemani, who curated the exhibition The Milk of Dreams for Biennale Arte 2022; Stefanie Hessler, director of Swiss Institute in New York; Priyesh Mistry, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London; Erika Balsom, Reader in Film Studies at King's College, London; and Stefan Tarnowski, Early-Career Research Fellow in AMES and Social Anthropology at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge.
Published on the occasion of the double exhibition at GAMeC, Bergamo, in 2023-2024, and at Frac Bretagne, Rennes, in 2024.
Video and visual artist Ali Cherri (born 1976 in Beirut, lives and works in Paris and Beirut) received a BA in graphic design from the American University in Beirut in 2000, and an MA in performing arts from DasArts, Amsterdam, in 2005. His current project looks at the place of the archaeological object in the construction of historical narratives.
He has recently participated in the following group exhibitions: “But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise” (Guggenheim, New York, 2016); “Rainbow Caravane” (Aichi Triennial, Japan, 2016); “A Taxonomy of Fallacies: The Life of Dead Objects” (monographic exhibition, Museum Sursock Beyrouth, 2016); “Lest the Two Seas Meet” (Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea, 2016); “Matérialité de l'Invisible” (Centquatre, Paris, 2016); “The Time is Out of Joint” (Sharjah Art Space, United Arab Emirates, 2016).