Ali Cherri: To Fall, Patiently
Gairloch Gardens & Centennial Square
Saturday, June 13, 2026 | 2–5 PM
Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) is a Paris-based artist with three decades of artistic practice spanning across film, performance, sculpture, drawing, and installations. Awarded the Silver Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and exhibited in leading museums around the world, Ali Cherri presents films, sculptures and watercolour paintings in both our galleries as well as in Gairloch Gardens.
Highly influenced by the Lebanese postwar art scene, Ali Cherri’s complex body of work interrogates how histories and currencies of political violence resonate through generations as well as physical and cultural landscapes, objects and places.
At the Gairloch Gallery, Ali Cherri presents a series of sculptures, assembled elegantly between different materials, each a hybrid involving ancient artifacts found by the artist in auctions or marketplaces. Adjacent to the sculptures is a series of watercolour paintings and the film Of Men and Gods and Mud, which explores the relationship between humans, labour, and the environment in northern Sudan. Two sculptures by Ali Cherri will be installed outdoors in the sculpture garden of Gairloch Gardens: The bronze sculpture The Tree of Life re-interprets ancient Assyrian reliefs of a sacred tree, while the neon sculpture Les (Sur)Vivants poetically references the perils of surviving catastrophe. As part of our summer program, Ali Cherri also presents two evenings of his films as part of Sunset Kino. Stay tuned for an updated Sunset Kino program.
At the Centennial Gallery, the artist presents the film The Watchman. Set in Cyprus, the film features a soldier on watch at the edge of no-man’s land between the Greek Cypriot south and the Turkish Cypriot north. As with much of Cherri’s work, the film concerns itself with questions of borders and the challenges they enact upon ideas of sovereignty, identity, and geopolitical realities.
The rich tapestry of Ali Cherri’s work oscillates between history and memory, realities of violence and residues of trauma, political spectacle and the stuff of dreams, ancient objects and myth and sensuality, death and survival, fragility and resilience, materiality and mortality, and museal knowledge and its ruins. The exhibition is supported by TD Bank Group.
