Triptych - Studies from a Human Body
3-channel video installation - Running Horse Gallery (2012) Lebanon
In Triptych - Studies from a Human Body, Ali Cherri portrays his body stretched out horizontally over three screens. The fragmented body thus appears to be a permanent “battlefield” of violence, desires and pressures, trying to construct an identity that negotiates social constructs to reassert itself. Individual agency in creating the sexed body is confronted with other powers at play in the mediated image of the body. How can the body move from the sexed body it has been assigned to the ubiquitous; “how can the body move from the autobiographical project to a universal and potentially anonymous image.”
The body thus becomes in Cherri’s work a performative site, enacting as well as describing the identity it appears to be. Although it purports in this digital triptych to be the body of “order” and “rules” that reflects the normative social body, it nevertheless raises the possibility to challenge it and construct “counter- discourses” and “counter-identities” to contest stigmatised individualities.