Imane Fares Gallery – Ali Cherri – Dongola Limited Editions
“The Book of Mud is a manifesto, a reverie, a story of earth and water. From floods and deluges to droughts and water scarcity, mud is the materialisation of the aquatic reality of our world. Neither land nor water, yet also both, mud embodies an in-between state—a rich space for imagination.
Ali Cherri conceives The Book of Mud as an exploration of the past and the ways in which it inscribes itself physically: eroding, shaping, reforming, becoming itself through upheaval and destruction. In this project, Cherri is a storyteller in conversation with writers in both English and Arabic. Together they unveil the story of the mud – “… a story of perpetually shifting geographies, of elemental forces and terrain that cracks and rumbles and breaks over eons into new topographical formations. If mud had its own memory, what might it deem worth remembering?”
In this book of memory, Cherri understands mud as the vessel and the water within, as the brick that roots us to place and home, and the river that carries us to exploration elsewhere. Deeply embedded in narratives of creation, mud grounds life in a cycle that always finds its way back into the earth.
Artefacts, collected and encased in mudbrick, accompany the book to symbolise this timeless process. Worldly values embodied by these objects are once again ‘grounded,’ returned to the earth from which they came. A silkscreen print visualises a field of mudbricks drying in the sun, uniting earth and water as the building blocks of civilization. This art object, the culmination of a two-year project, features books, silkscreen, and mudbrick enclosed in a handcrafted white wooden box.”
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Imane Fares Gallery – Ali Cherri – Dongola Limited Editions
