This year’s Gardner FSC Fellow, acclaimed artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri, will present and discuss his film work at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, hosted by the Film Study Center. Exploring different geographies of violence in his native Lebanon but also in the broader region, Ali Cherri is a Paris-based artist with three decades of artistic practice spanning across film, performance, sculpture, drawing, and installations, interrogating the ways in which political violence disseminates into people’s bodies and the physical and cultural landscape. Shaped by the vibrant artistic scene of postwar Beirut in the 1990s, Cherri began to investigate the sensorial coproduction of reality between images of conflict, the urban fabric and his own body.

The Dam
Directed by Ali Cherri, 84 min, 2022

Sudan, near the Merowe dam. Maher works in a traditional brickyard fed by the waters of the Nile. Every evening, he secretly wanders off into the desert to build a mysterious construction made of mud. While the Sudanese people rise to claim their freedom, his creation starts to take a life of its own…

Admission is free