Ali Cherri
Le songe d’une nuit sans rêve
Frac Bretagne presents Le Songe d’une nuit sans rêve (Dreamless Night), the first solo exhibition in France by Ali Cherri, a Lebanese artist living in France.
The exhibition, a co-production with GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, and In Between Art Film Foundation, will present the new video work The Watchman (2023), as well as a series of original sculptures and drawings, specially produced for the exhibition, which relate to the symbolic elements and characters of the film, as well as to the geographical and cultural landscape of Cyprus.
Shot in Louroujina, a small village in the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the film centers on the figure of a soldier who guards the southern border with the Greek-Cypriot-dominated Republic of Cyprus. During his long and tedious guards, the hills inhabited by the “enemy” become the scene of the soldier’s fantasies and daydreams. The Watchman continues Ali Cherri’s critical investigation of border politics, nation-building and the radical potential of the imagination. The artist also evokes the historical links of migration between Cyprus and Lebanon, as well as those between Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and Beirut, the artist’s hometown, which was also divided during the Lebanese civil war.
Curators: Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi
The exhibition will be accompanied by a monographic catalog published by Lenz Press and produced by Galerie Imane Fares, Paris.
Image : Ali Cherri, The Watchman, 2023 (capture-détail) © Ali Cherri.
Courtesy of the artist, In Between Art Film Foundation and Galerie Imane Fares Paris