Ali Cherri’s short film The Sentinel, which had its European premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, begins with a soldier dreaming of putting a gun to his mouth, only to wake up in an empty barracks. Over the next half-hour a series of tableaux, set in and around the barracks on Bastille Day, charts the soldier’s state of mind as he slowly loses his grip on reality. Human vulnerability in the face of political violence is a theme Cherri, whose parents were killed by an Israeli air strike on Beirut in 2024, has spent years exploring in films and installations. This exhibition at WIELS in Brussels is structured around three films: as well as The Sentinel there is The Watchman (2024), in which a Turkish-Cypriot guard is haunted by the ghosts of soldiers who fought in the region, and Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), which follows the work of labourers near the Merowe Dam in northern Sudan (5 September–3 January 2027). Mud is a constant in Cherri’s work, and several of the sculptures on view here are made of mud mixed with bronze, marble or found stone fragments.
Find out more from WIELS’s website.
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