Ali Cherri

The Bourse de Commerce is setting into motion as it prepares the exhibition "Corps et âmes", which will gradually unveil until its full opening on March 5. During this time, you can explore select pieces from the upcoming season.

Starting February 5, the twenty-four display cases in the Passage of the Bourse de Commerce feature works by filmmaker and sculptor Ali Cherri. Personnaly marked by Lebanon’s civil war and today by the region’s persistent conflicts, the artist breathes life into artifacts (objects and fragments from various cultures and regions) and invents characters who are unwitting witnesses to these confrontations. 

In occupying the display cases, a classic museum device, and taking advantage of the Bourse de Commerce's circularity, his work alludes to film and its twenty-four images per second, constituting ghostly flashes between reality and fiction, past and present.  

In combining archaeological finds with his own creations, the artist gives birth to half-asleep chimeras that compel us to reflect on the manipulations of artifacts (i.e., their plundering, trafficking, and appropriation) and consequences of such actions, such as the loss of meaning. “The grafts I make in my series of sculptures constitute a form of solidarity between bodies that have been shattered, fragmented, and violated, and which create a community by being fused together,” Cherri explains. Ali Cherri was also inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1930 Surrealist film The Blood of a Poet. In applying handwritten phrases from the screenplay to the backgrounds of the display cases, they come to symbolise a passage from one world to another.

In the Auditorium, from February 8 to March 2
The Watchman, 2024

The Watchman, a short film by Ali Cherri, shows a soldier guarding a border on which, day after day, nothing seems to happen. During his long, boring watches, the hills inhabited by “the enemy” become a stage for the soldier's ghosts and reveries.  

The film was shot in Louroujina, a small village in the unrecognised Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, where the soldier stands guard at its southern border. The island of Cyprus, located off the coast of Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean, is the theatre of a geopolitical conflict that has remained frozen for decades since Turkey’s 1974 invasion, which resulted in Cyprus’ division into two entities. Only the southern portion, the Republic of Cyprus, is recognised as a sovereign state and member of the European Union.  

The Watchman continues Ali Cherri’s critical investigation of the politics of borders, the geographies of violence, the construction of a nation, the absurdity of military protocols, and the radical potential of our imagination.  

The Watchman was commissioned and produced by the Fondazione In Between Art Film. It was co-produced by the Vega Foundation and KinoElektron. The film received support from Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, Robert Matta – Fondation RAM, the Brittany Regional Contemporary Art Foundation (FRAC) and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture.

The film is screened every hour on the half-hour with subtitles in French, and on the hour with subtitles in English. 
Version with French subtitles screened at 11:30 a.m., and 12:30, 1:30, 2:30, 3:30, 4:30, 5:30, and 6:30 p.m. 
Version with English subtitles screened at 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00, and 6:00 p.m. 
As an exception, there will not be any screenings on Wednesday, 19 February. 

Curated by: Jean‑ Marie Gallais, Curator, Pinault Collection