Giovanni’s Room is pleased to present The Lightless Hours by Ali Cherri. The gallery will present Ali Cherri’s film “The Watchman” (2023) with daily screenings every 30 minutes. Ali has shared his heart with us all through a multi decade career, and we all are deep with gratitude to have his friendship and mentorship. 

Now Instant will present a screening of Ali Cherri’s feature length film “The Dam” (2022) Saturday December 13 at 2pm. Tickets are limited. 

The words etched onto the wall of your guard post command you: Wake up soldier, open your eyes. Your job is to watch, yet nobody wants to hear what you see. Here on the border of Northern Cyprus, there have been no reports of consequence since 1974. Waiting for an enemy who never comes, you’re visited only by the sporadic robin deceived by the transparent window of your watch tower. Unable to see what's in front of it even as it flies with eyes wide open, it becomes the latest victim of an endless stalemate. The haunted landscape is otherwise marked by dying plants and a partially abandoned village, where you find an isolated woman who laments how she named her son after a local martyr and thus seemed to seal his own fate. The word “martyr,” which comes from the Greek for “witness,” has marked him as yet another watchman. A bead of sweat falls down your neck like a teardrop. 

In Ali Cherri’s The Watchman, the particularities of Cyprus stands in for indistinct nationalisms and (post-)colonialisms, a landscape layered with ghosts of past conflict, haunted from the first shot by both the terror of nothing happening and the despair of all that has already happened. The environment is a palimpsest, a recording device in which violence and misery is enacted, marked down, and played back to those with eyes to see. Eventually, at the borderland between sleep and wakefulness, as a soldier’s view of the horizon line fades into the only border toward which we all march, you wait for an enemy that never comes, until it does: the one that comes for us all. Will you join the troop of soldiers with their eyes shut, marching toward the only destination we all have? Or do you continue to watch, record, and report, even when nobody wants to see it?

- Alexander Schneider, December 2025

Ali Cherri’s work is inspired by artefacts and the natural world. His sculptures, drawings and installations explore the temporal shifts between ancient worlds and contemporary societies. Using archaeological artefacts as a starting point, he investigates the boundaries of ideologies that underpin the foundations of nations and the myth of national progression. His work explores the links between archaeology, historical narrative and heritage, considering the processes of excavation and relocation of cultural objects into museums.

Ali Cheri is represented by Galerie Imane Farès in collaboration with Almine Rech. His works are part of many major collections, including MoMA: Museum of Modern Art (New York); Collection Pinault (Paris); British Museum (London); Art Jameel (Dubai), Centre Pompidou (Paris); MACBA (Barcelona); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York; Mathaf (Doha); SeMA: Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul); [mac] Musée d’art contemporain de Marseille (Marseille); Musée Bonnefanten (Maastricht)