Ali Cherri "The Watchers" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille

At Marseille’s [mac], the Lebanese artist stages a poetic confrontation between past and present, myth and memoryAli Cherri, Lucie, 2023. Glass ocular prosthetics, wood, brass, epoxy putty, plaster © Ali Cherri Studio. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist.The [mac] Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille presents ‘The Watchers’, a significant exhibition by Ali Cherri that invites viewers to look anew at museum collections—and the stories they tell. Built around two totemic sculptures, The Gatekeepers FIRE and WATER (2020), acquired by the Museums of Marseille in 2024, the exhibition stages a dialogue between Cherri’s works and nearly 80 objects drawn from the city’s collections, spanning from antiquity to the present.
As part of this immersive project, Cherri was given free rein to select works across Marseille’s public collections—from archaeology and fine art to ethnography and natural history—and to reframe them within an atmospheric, cinematic scenography. Sleep, vulnerability, animality, hybridity, and the gaze are recurring themes in a show that resists conventional museographic categorisation. Instead of grouping works by period or region, ‘The Watchers’ dissolves boundaries, inviting connections through shared gestures, forms, and states of being.
A voiceover from Les statues meurent aussi, the seminal anticolonial film essay by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet, echoes throughout the exhibition. “When souls are dead, they enter history; when statues are dead, they enter art,” recites actor Jean Negroni, setting the tone for Cherri’s meditation on cultural death and resurrection. His curatorial and artistic approach—part archival, part alchemical—revives forgotten or displaced objects, reactivating their aura.
Created for Manifesta 13 in Marseille, The Gatekeepers are four large-scale totems evoking creatures from the animal and mythological realms. The two now in the [mac] collection, FIRE and WATER, were made from curiosity objects sourced from auctions and antique shops—artefacts stripped of their original function but restored, in Cherri’s hands, to a symbolic presence. Like many others in the exhibition, these hybrid sculptures disrupt assumptions about authenticity and value. As Cherri notes: “Forgeries have a signature, just like artists!”
The exhibition also includes recent works such as La Tête qui marche (2024), Tête en terre endormie (2023), and Lucie (2023), alongside archaeological masks, ancient falcons, and 16th-century lion heads. Deprived of conventional labels or contextual framing, these pieces are displayed on light tables or in shadowy vitrines. Some appear to observe us, rather than the other way around. In this charged environment, the museum becomes a stage where objects perform rather than rest.
‘The Watchers’ also resonates with Cherri’s engagement with Giacometti, particularly in his recent participation in the Fondation Giacometti’s exhibition Envisagement. Works in the [mac] show are placed in dialogue with Alberto Giacometti: Sculpting the Void, and are on view simultaneously at the Cantini Museum. Both exhibitions probe the representation of the human face and figure, layering memory, form, and absence.
Born in Beirut and based in Paris, Cherri is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work blends sculpture, drawing, cinema, and performance. He draws on the legacies of Lebanon’s Civil War and the broader region to explore how violence shapes bodily, historical, and cultural landscapes. His art, often marked by a tactile engagement with materials, brings together the living and the non-living, the real and the imagined.
Curated by Cherri with Stéphanie Airaud (with the support of trainee curator Christelle Faure and curators from Marseille’s various museums), ‘The Watchers’ is more than an exhibition—it is a haunting and poetic experiment in museum-making. By dissolving borders between disciplines and eras, it offers a renewed gaze on the collections of Marseille and a compelling reflection on what it means to bear witness.
The exhibition will be on view from the 6th of June 2025 until the 4th of January 2026. Please visit the [mac] Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille for more information.