Ali Cherri’s GAMeC Show Explores Border Life and Soldier Alienation

Ali Cherri (Beirut, 1976) presents his largest solo exhibition to date at GAMeC in Bergamo, produced with Fondazione In Between Art Film and curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi. The show features new site-specific works including the video installation 'The Watchman,' drawings, and sculptures. 'The Watchman,' set in GAMeC's Spazio Zero, follows a young soldier stationed in a watchtower on the border of the Turkish enclave in Cyprus—a no-man's-land undisturbed since 1974, where the only disruption is robins dying against the tower windows. Cherri uses metaphors of death and violence—militarized landscapes, dead birds, decomposed cacti—to convey the soldier's alienation and liminal state between reality and dream. The exhibition continues with paintings and watercolors echoing natural elements from the film, such as robins and cacti, treated with scientific precision. Upstairs, 'The Dismembered Bird' is a large mud-and-water sculpture of a dismembered eagle, a symbol of sovereignty, incorporating a 16th-century eagle head. The show concludes with 'The Prickly Pear Garden,' a resin installation blending symbolic and visual play. Curator Rabottini describes the exhibition as 'a tactile and perceptual experience rich in narrative stimuli.' The works collectively critique borders' negative impacts on society and environment.