GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo and Fondazione In Between Art Film, with Frac Bretagne, are delighted to announce Dreamless Night, a newly commissioned exhibition by artist and director Ali Cherri (Beirut, b. 1976), who was awarded the Silver Lion for Promising Young Participant at the Biennale Arte 2022 in Venice.

Opening in October at GAMeC, and traveling to Frac Bretagne, Rennes, in February 2024, the exhibition will be the largest presentation to date of Cherri’s multimedia practice, which encompasses film, video installation, drawing, and sculpture.

Curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi, respectively Artistic Director and Curator at the Fondazione In Between Art Film, Dreamless Night isthe first project launched under Unison, a new biennial initiative created by the Fondazione to commission and produce moving image-based exhibitions together with Italian and international institutions.

GAMeC’s Spazio Zero will host The Watchman (2023), a new video work by the artist commissioned and produced by the Fondazione, which will be presented as a large-scale video installation.

Set in Cyprus, the East Mediterranean island at the core of decades-long tensions between local Greek and Turkish communities, the film sets out from the political history of this troubled territory and the personal stories of its inhabitants. The aim is to propose a wider reflection on the politics of the recognition of borders and their painful consequences with regard of sovereignty, identity, and ultimately peace. Cyprus was chosen by the artist because of the historical relationships of migration between the island and Lebanon, as well as the geopolitical similarities between Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and the artist’s native Beirut, which was also divided during the Lebanese Civil War.

The Watchman is centered around the figure of a soldier whose job is to guard the border of the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. This soldier, like many others before him, spends his prolonged and dull shifts perched on a watchtower looking out for “the enemy,” who may or may not arrive down the hills of the recognized Republic of Cyprus under Greek-Cypriot rule. The stagnating landscape traps the protagonist in a physical and metaphorical threshold where the edges between alertness and sleepiness, reality and imagination are constantly trespassed until his fantasies and reveries take over and unleash unexpected events. Through a speculative fictional approach typical of Cherri’s filmic practice, The Watchman continues the artist’s critical investigation into conflicts of acknowledgment, the inheritance of historical trauma, and the radical potential of the imagination.

The exhibition rooms will also host a series of original sculptures and drawings that emanate from the iconography and characters in the film as well as the geographical and cultural landscape of Cyprus. From local military infrastructures painted on a fabric curtain to spectral soldiers majestically sculpted out of mud, to resin-casted cacti commonly used in the Mediterranean area as fencing plants, Cherri frames the theatricality and fragility of the ideologies of power by enlarging their symbols while imbuing them with material weakness.

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