Ali Cherri was born in 1976 in Beirut. He received a BA in graphic design from the American University in Beirut in 2000, and an MA in performing arts from DasArts, Amsterdam, in 2005. Cherri is an artist and designer who works with drawing, film, installation, performance, print, and video, tracing correspondences between political and geological disasters in his native Lebanon and neighboring territories. In his video The Disquiet (2013), Cherri explores the violent history of earthquakes and tsunamis in Lebanon, which is situated on the site of several major geologic flaws, analyzing the seismic conditions of a country that has also been subject to numerous manmade conflicts. In Trembling Landscapes (Paysages Tremblants, 2014–16), a series of ink-stamped aerial maps of Algiers, Beirut, Damascus, Erbil, Makkah, and Tehran, he highlights fault lines that have resulted in catastrophic earthquakes, juxtaposing them with instances of political unrest and architectural development. In the most recent addition to this series, he explores the Islamic holy city of Makkah, focusing on an invisible fissure associated with a religious fable about a vision of the Day of Judgment that portends a violent earthquake and the ascension of the Kaaba (House of God)—a commentary on the town’s rapid construction and the corresponding erosion of its Ottoman heritage. Cherri has also unearthed systems of archeological preservation, exploring the history of ruins and cartography in the context of the Middle East and North Africa’s pre- and postcolonial histories. For Archéologie (2014), for example, he sourced maps from the late nineteenth-century colonial era and reproduced them in ink and charcoal to create a sense of foreboding reminiscent of scenes from German Romantic paintings. In the film The Digger (2015), he explores a 5,000-year-old necropolis in the Sharjah dessert guarded by two Pakistani caretakers, one of whom has been employed there for more than twenty years and has participated in several excavations. Cherri chronicles the man’s daily duties to conjure a poetic view of preservation, heritage, and labor, and the eventual display of archaeological finds in the region’s new museums. Cherri has participated in the group exhibitions Songs of Loss and Songs of Love, Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea (2014); Desires and Necessities, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2015); Lest the Two Seas Meet, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2015); and Matérialité de l’Invisible, Le Centquatre, Paris (2016); The Time is Out of Joint, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2016); and Earth and Ever After, Saudi Art Council, Jeddah (2016). Cherri has exhibited and screened work at venues including the Beirut Art Center (2011), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012), and Tate Modern, London (2013). His film The Digger was the recipient of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival’s New Vision Award 2015. Ali Cherri lives and works in Paris and Beirut.