Mud predominates in Ali Cherri’s exhibition at Baltic. It fills the top, vaulted gallery of the former flour mill with a loamy scent while light glinting off the material casts an ochre glow. It forms the bodies of five strange figures standing sentinel in the front half of the space like guardians to a lost necropolis. Cherri has embedded archaic masks and vessels snagged from online auctions in their cracked, dusty bodies to phantasmic effect. Wall labels offer clues to the origins of these acquired objects – a Maya cult vase, a Makonde mask from Tanzania – but repurposed, they seem more like benevolent spirits roused from slumber by an archaeological dig.
Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976 in the midst of the Lebanese civil war; this is his first museum survey in the UK. In his work, bodies are often broken by war or colonisation, but they are never beyond repair. Across wildly differing mediums, he communicates a sense of hope in adversity without coming off as preachy or ponderous. The more than two dozen sculptures, paintings and films on display here are just as remarkable for their ambition as for their restraint. The Makonde mask in Seated Figure, for instance, sits atop an inchoate mound of hardened earth, where crudely shaped arms and a lap lend it an air of wizened repose. The figure’s form has nothing to do with the Makonde people, and Cherri’s appropriation might be an anthropologist’s idea of vandalism were it not for the fact that his sculptures snatch antiquities from the private market and sneak them back into museums under his name. In the process, they ask uneasy questions about how value is assigned to some artworks over others, and point us to the ways that display strategies in western museums can strip objects of their vitality.
In Cherri’s sculptures, those objects will outlive their unfired clay bodies. His exhibition’s central work, a three-channel video titled Of Men and Gods and Mud, reminds us that such humble matter can hold the fate of civilisations. Early cities were made of mud, and dissolved back into the mire. We watch as labourers in northern Sudan wet dirt and shape the sludge into bricks using wooden moulds, with the ancient Nubian pyramids of Meroë rising over a line of palm trees in the distance. Paired with a softly droning soundtrack, Cherri’s lens, alternating between closeups of the men and sweeping landscapes, gives the film the intimate, synaptic quality of ASMR. A voiceover recalls that in many creation myths, man was made of primeval ooze, from Adam with his clay rib to Gilgamesh’s dust-borne companion Enkidu. “Out of mud we were made, out of mud we dreamed we were made. Then we forgot or sought to forget,” voices say in alternating English and Arabic. Such hubris recalls Percy Shelley’s Ozymandias, a vast statue of a tyrannical pharaoh swallowed up by desert sands; in Cherri’s work we find “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”.
Fittingly the gallery is flanked by two high vitrines, set into its north and south walls, which Cherri has filled with miniaturised pedestals that once supported now toppled monuments. Painted the same dark red as the vitrine’s wooden interior, they look like jewellery shop window displays after a heist. The pedestals’ titles list their place of origin, each summoning scenes of riot and revolution: Kharkiv, Aleppo, Baghdad. The plinth that held the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, torn down by Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, is here too; when city workers fished the statue from the bottom of the harbour, they found it full of mud.
Monuments and museums are the battlegrounds of history. Cherri wants us to know that we can write our own narratives. The Watchman, a second short film which plays in a black box cinema, follows a lone Turkish sentry on the border between Cyprus and Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus who struggles to maintain his sanity and individualism. The gallery outside the cinema is filled with great, ghoulish sculptures of soldiers’ heads impaled on steel poles like automatons. A large painted backdrop behind them shows the view from the watchman’s tower. These works are neither props nor set pieces, but rather evocations of the trickery and stagecraft that furnish the machinery of war.
And war seems endless these days. Cherri’s work is timely in ways the artist may not have expected: he completed Of Men and Gods and Mud – and its enigmatic, companion feature film, The Dam – in May 2022, less than a year before the outbreak of civil war in Sudan. Recent reports of looting at the Sudan National Museum followed by attacks on Darfur’s largest refugee camp reveal that the destruction of culture often accompanies the destruction of human life. We forgot we were made from mud, which is to say, we’re all made the same.
• Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument is at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, until 12 October.
