Walking into How I Am Monument feels like entering the excavation site of a 21st-century technocratic pharaoh.

In the soft golden light, mud and bronze sculptures are backlit by expansive screens flickering with figures working earthly exudations. Further behind the screens, sweeping theatrical drapes depicting a painted landscape swag down two storeys from ceiling to floor. This sweeping exhibition by Ali Cherri poses questions about conflict, violence, and identity across media and geographies, which could not be asked at a more pertinent moment.

Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976 in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War. Influenced by his upbringing, politics, conflict and identity permeate throughout his multidisciplinary work spanning film, paper, clay and various media between. These themes are often wrapped in the semiotic vocabulary of museum exhibits; this approach originates from formative museum visits in his early years. The influence of museology is a thread explored for the power these cultural institutions have in shaping national belief and identity, as well as their often blindly accepted authority in crafted narratives. Living in Paris, he has spent years scooping relics from auction houses to incorporate into his work. These pieces appear in works like Titan 2 which combines a Mayan cult vase with a body formed of mud.

How I Am Monument unites previous pieces, with newly commissioned works including Sphinx and Toppled Monuments 1-6. Flanking the room, the glass vitrines of Toppled Monuments 1-6 contain wooden plinths that represent statues which have been deposed or vandalised during the post-Soviet era, Arab Spring, and Black Lives Matter movement. Each named for their location from Khakhiv to Bristol, the empty platforms offer up blank slates for the creation of future identities. Sphinx sits between Cherri’s other creationist sculptures, combining the classic statue material bronze with sculpted mud. Combining a noble element usually reserved for memorials of national heroes, bronze, with the commonplace and fragile mud, the statue calls into question the permanence of political power. 

In a slightly-hidden back room, the film Watcher brings viewers into the liminal world of a sentry living between spaces and times. The eyeball-tingly opening sequence prepares the ground for the increasingly curious turns of the film. Throughout the exhibition, viewers are invited to reflect on zones of conflict and how we construct personal and national identity through the cultural icons and monuments, from statues to symbolic flora and fauna.  

This exhibition opens as we find ourselves in a world fraught with conflict and political upheaval. Questions of land, identity, and sovereignty are contested in Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, and Sudan. Each violent explosion an interrobang leaving its mark on bodies, psyches, and topography. Stepping into his exhibition encourages us to question narrative truths that we accept without question because they come with a bronze plate inscription. Ultimately, Cherri invites us to consider the habitus and terra-forming nature of conflict, what it leaves behind, and what futures we could shape.

By Rowan Twine

Main image: Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument (installation view), Secession, Vienna, 2024. Photo: © Ali Cherri Studio, courtesy the artist and Imane Farès, Paris.

 

How I Am Monument is at the Baltic in Gateshead until October 12, 2025. For more information, click here.