The [mac] – Museum of Contemporary Art of Marseille presents the exhibition Ali Cherri, The Watchers, centered around the totemic sculptures The Gatekeepers Fire and Water by Ali Cherri, acquired in 2024 by the Museums of Marseille. On this occasion, the [mac] invites the artist to select works from across the city’s museum collections — from Antiquity to the contemporary era — to place them in dialogue with his own sculptures, drawings, and videos. Within an immersive and cinematic scenography, Ali Cherri offers a renewed perspective on these pieces through themes central to his work: sleep, vulnerability, animality, hybridization, the gaze, the face, materiality, resistance, and representations of the living.
“When souls are dead, they enter history, when statues are dead, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture. (…) Civilizations leave behind these mutilated traces, like the pebbles of Little Thumb. But history has consumed everything. An object is dead when the living gaze that once rested upon it has vanished.”
The voice-over of Jean Negroni, narrator of the film Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die), the famous anti-colonial film essay by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet (produced between 1949 and 1953), echoes at the heart of Ali Cherri’s exhibition The Watchers.
In total, around 80 works are exhibited, spanning various forms and typologies: sculptures, stone carvings, paintings, archaeological artifacts, photographs, and videos. Ali Cherri selects them much as he casts actors in his films — whether a brickmaker in Sudan or an elderly woman from a Cypriot village. This offers an opportunity to renew the narrative around Marseille’s museum collections over the long term, through the lens of a major figure on the contemporary art scene.
The Gatekeepers Fire and Water are part of a set of four totems created for Manifesta 13 in Marseille in 2020. Drawing on figures inspired by the animal kingdom, the aquatic world, and imaginary monstrous beings, The Gatekeepers, presented at the Museum of Fine Art in Marseille, paid tribute to the spirit of all the taxidermied animals housed in the nearby Natural History Museum of Marseille, located in the opposite wing of the Palais Longchamp. To create these works, Ali Cherri collected objects of curiosity — acquired at auctions or from antique dealers, in Marseille or beyond. Stripped of their ritual power or original nature along their journey, the artist sought to restore to them a lost presence, a reclaimed aura. His work raises questions about the trajectory of cultural objects in the Western world, while also reflecting on their materials — and the stories they carry.
“The chimera sculptures I create by combining archaeological objects with my own creations highlight these layers of forgeries. I buy works on the legal market, often suspecting that they are fakes. What interests me is the authority over the ‘true nature’ of things: forgeries, after all, have a signature, just like artists! In fact, the way I look at these objects is primarily aesthetic; their meaning holds no interest for me. I keep them in my apartment or studio until the moment I find a way to use them. It happens intuitively, without preconceived ideas.” Ali Cherri, 2024.
Ali Cherri has imagined a scenography in which the objects escape traditional or Western museographic (Natural History Museum) narratives, as well as the usual classifications by geographic region or historical period. This shift unsettles conventional systems of heritage values.
Stripped of descriptions about their origin or authenticity, the objects — presented on equal footing — seem to gaze back at us. Some, displayed on illuminated tables without casting a shadow, appear to lose their cultural grounding and the soil from which they emerged. The museum’s rooms, bathed in semi-darkness, enhance a carefully choreographed theatricality.
Masks, faces, and animal or hybrid figures that populate the exhibition invite viewers to experience otherness. They extend — or deconstruct — the story of how knowledge and national narratives have been constructed across the Marseille museum network, whether through fine art, archaeology, science, or ethnology.
Like the totems of Indigenous American peoples, Ali Cherri’s Gatekeepers carry symbols, beliefs, and stories. Their narrative structure is non-linear — it unfolds through accumulation and layering, through echoes and hybridization. They follow the tradition of placing totems near the thresholds of certain communities.
Through this exhibition, Ali Cherri traces the journey of historical objects — from their discovery to their entry into the art market or a museum collection. By exploring what these objects reveal about history, society, nature, or culture, he also illuminates what they say about us: the magic by which they are transformed into values, fetishes, idols, and totems.
Press release from [mac] – Museum of Contemporary Art of Marseille
Image: Ali Cherri. The Gatekeepers. 2020. Installation view at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Marseille. Four totem poles: Fire, Earth, Wind, Water. 320 x 100 x 50 cm each. Commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille. © Jean Christophe Lett. Image courtesy of Galerie Imane Farès
