We are of earth and sky, an amalgamation of material and spiritual interconnectedness that Ali Cherri excavates and sublimes in “How I Am Monument,” an expansive show curated by Emma Dean at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in the U.K. In film, sculpture, watercolor painting and installation, including new commissions, the multidisciplinary artist explores what grounds and connects humans through mythical time and incarnated places. Here, monuments are conceived as both legacies and soil from which possibilities emerge.
The show is articulated around three broad segments that interlace to create a cohesive meditation on beginnings and endings. We move from earth to sky, construction to degradation, from what lies beneath to what—possibly—awaits above. In the first segment are the large-scale mud sculptures that have become Cherri’s signature. In dim light, their appearance is at once dramatic and totemic. Some are inspired by Surrealism, such as All That is Solid Melts Into Air (2024), in which a character’s arms and face disappear into a vision-impaired, hand-shaped crawling walking stick. Others are inscribed in a more mystical realm. This is the case of Titan 2 (2022)—shown at the 2022 Venice Biennial, where Cherri was awarded the Silver Lion—which incorporates a Mayan cult vase into an aggrandized mud figure.
In Sphinx (2024), we contemplate various overlays of symbolisms: the figure of the sphinx itself, an ancient spiritual guardian of ancient Egypt, which here looks part-Assyrian part-Italian Futurist with a visible armature, a slithering snake at the base of the sphinx, a plinth adorned with a mysterious city skyline that connects modern places like New York City and the ancient tall mud houses of Yemen’s Hadramout. The sphinx is amputated. It rests on bronze prosthetic legs with leonine paws, creating a visual tension through a sensation of instability. In the merging of mud and bronze lies a commentary on human civilization, often reduced to offensive hierarchies. In Cherri’s Sphinx, bronze holds mud, but mud prevails overall because it will corrode bronze.
His raw sculptures evoke a timeless encounter with material and human societies, connecting contexts to power and violence. Mud is the base material for Cherri’s sculptures. At once fragile and primordial, mud acts as a thread connecting these sculptures with Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), a three-channel film narrating the story of the Merowe Dam in Sudan through the lens of mud brick workers along with their relationship to the land and the stars.
Progressing through the show, visitors encounter another segment devoted to conflict fatigue and the impact of war on humans and nature alike. The Watchman (2023) is set on the divided island of Cyprus, where a demarcation line strewn with observation towers between the Republic of Cyprus and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus remembers a vivid wound. “There is no such thing as a good war,” an elderly woman summarizes in the film.
Centering on a young Turkish Cypriot soldier on watch, The Watchman follows his boredom and hallucinations. He stands erect, like a living monument. He is assailed by exhaustion (“wake up, soldier, open your eyes” are warning words etched on the watchtower’s walls). Yet the only incoming threat along this contested zone is of a bird which lands on the window glass, an absurdist touch as well as an omen. The soldier’s long days and nights of nothingness staring at the vacuous no-man’s land are punctuated by eerie flashes of light. In this film, as well as Of Men and Gods and Mud, flickers of light convey a signal, a message and a portent. These lights say that there is another world, a cosmic and spiritual dimension that blinks at us if we pay close attention to it. This is reinforced in The Watchman by an uncanny encounter toward the end of the film that not only probes the space between dreaming and reality but also the spectrum of sanity and agency that one can retain under such circumstances.
The film’s spectral encounter is re-enacted and incarnated in The Seven Soldiers (2023), monumental heads of closed-eyed soldiers on pikes lined as if part of a forest of the undead, an army of sleepers. A series of watercolor paintings representing The Watchtower’s crashing bird and a prickly pear’s various stages of decomposition illustrate Cherri’s artistic range as a sculptor, filmmaker and painter, and capture the show’s parable: what is destined to live will die eventually; what dies may rise again.
The final segment on the flanks of the Baltic’s large exhibition space displays new commissions. Behind the museological-looking glass stand wooden maquettes of empty plinths commemorating monuments toppled in recent years. Toppled Monuments 1–6 (Kharkiv, Aleppo, Baghdad, Richmond VA, Vienna, Bristol), 2024, embody transience and the implacable arrow of history. These monuments, once erected to honor imperial slave traders, dictators, Confederate leaders and other infamous figures, show history in perpetual movement and the collapse of mythmaking.
Cherri investigates metamorphosis from materiality to more metaphysical reflections. Artefacts—ancient masks that feature in his sculptures—make a statement on the value of auctioned art to give them new meaning and accessibility outside private collections. At a more symbolic level, metamorphosis is contained in mud. And if legends tell us that men were created from mud, then mud is an avatar for the will to live. Yet in this picture, war intrudes.
Violent conflict is a disrupter as much as an untimely accelerator of this mythical fall; its toll and confusion yield destruction and uncertain salvation. Such fissures reveal liminal spaces (one thinks of barzakh, the Islamic intermediary stage between death and the Day of Judgment), zones of physical disorientation and penetrating clarity that Cherri invites us to inhabit. These ruminations are cyclical, and there is a faint beacon of hope that something new can spring from the ashes.
Ali Cherri is seemingly everywhere these days with recent shows at the Swiss Institute in New York City, the Bourse de Commerce and FRAC Bretagne in France, Vienna’s Secession and the 12th SITE SANTA FE International, to name a few. This is why some of the works may feel like they have been shown elsewhere—they have, in large part—but that does not diminish the timeliness of Cherri’s prolific catalogue and message of whether we can ever become responsible future ancestors living according to our material and spiritual realities and purpose.
Born during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), Cherri was directly affected by Israel’s aggression against Lebanon in 2024. The theme of war’s impact on nature and humans is, for the artist, not an abstraction. At once necropolis and chrysalid with its own possibility of rebirth, “How I Am Monument” can also be seen as a testimonial to resilience and survival more broadly. Each one of us is embodied—a defiant monument in the making.
“How I Am Monument” is on show at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Arts in the U.K. through October 12, 2025.
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