Mud predominates in Ali Cherri’s exhibition at Baltic. It fills the top, vaulted gallery of the former flour mill with a loamy scent while light glinting off the material casts an ochre glow. It forms the bodies of five strange figures standing sentinel in the front half of the space like guardians to a lost necropolis. Cherri has embedded archaic masks and vessels snagged from online auctions in their cracked, dusty bodies to phantasmic effect. Wall labels offer clues to the origins of these acquired objects – a Maya cult vase, a Makonde mask from Tanzania – but repurposed, they seem more like benevolent spirits roused from slumber by an archaeological dig.
Cherri was born in Beirut in 1976 in the midst of the Lebanese civil war; this is his first museum survey in the UK. In his work, bodies are often broken by war or colonisation, but they are never beyond repair. Across wildly differing mediums, he communicates a sense of hope in adversity without coming off as preachy or ponderous. The more than two dozen sculptures, paintings and films on display here are just as remarkable for their ambition as for their restraint. The Makonde mask in Seated Figure, for instance, sits atop an inchoate mound of hardened earth, where crudely shaped arms and a lap lend it an air of wizened repose. The figure’s form has nothing to do with the Makonde people, and Cherri’s appropriation might be an anthropologist’s idea of vandalism were it not for the fact that his sculptures snatch antiquities from the private market and sneak them back into museums under his name. In the process, they ask uneasy questions about how value is assigned to some artworks over others, and point us to the ways that display strategies in western museums can strip objects of their vitality.
