Ali Cherri’s “Last Watch Before Dawn”

Ali Cherri’s The Sentinel (2026) begins with a sitting soldier, gun in his mouth, finger on the trigger. The scene is interrupted by an alarm, and he awakes into an empty barracks on Bastille Day. But it is only a temporary reprieve from his dream: at the end of the new video that forms this exhibition’s centerpiece, Sergeant Lafleur walks into an empty barracks, and a lone gunshot rings out. Condensing the cycle of violence into one soldier’s last day on earth, it is a shocking continuation of the artist’s research into state-sanctioned terror and the ruin created in its wake: in history, in material culture, and in our collective consciousness.

The Sentinel is experienced by the viewer in two ways: as a standalone video, and in the context of this exhibition. Above the gallery’s basement viewing room, a series of larger-than-life sculptures—made in the Lebanese-born, Paris-based artist’s signature method of clay-and-sand modeling that mimics ancient mud figures—are placed against a painted backdrop of a vivid, highly-stylized sunset (Backdrop, 2025). The two human figures (Soldier 2 - weapon on the shoulder and Soldier 1 - weapon on the ground, both 2024) in this tableau are armed military combatants with crudely anonymous features whose broad shoulders and gangly limbs feel more akin to giants than men. The mythic scale and aesthetic continues with Counter-Monument (For the Fallen) (2025), whose depiction of a sleeping soldier is hung in the gallery as if it had recently been excavated from an archaeological dig. 

These sculptures also function as props in The Sentinel. Counter-Monument (For the Fallen) serves as the backdrop for Lafleur’s morning watch; the two “mud” sculptures as sphinxlike guards of an unnamed city where Lafleur, signed off from duty on doctor’s orders, watches a cabaret performance at a bar named Les Survivants, which is represented in the upstairs gallery by its neon sign and several jester-faced sconces (Nocturnal Light I-III, 2025) whose gazes follow us around. On emerging from the subterranean screening room, these objects appear to the viewer in an entirely different way. This both lends the show a narrative consistency and makes us question whether we’re in a gallery, on a movie set, or among the wreckage of a war. One of two series of watercolors—ten pieces all entitled To Save What Can Be Saved (2025)—capture the video’s uneasy state between living and dead, dreaming and awake: continuing a motif seen in The Sentinel and Counter-Monument (For the Fallen), each shows the slouched body of a soldier who might be sleeping or dead.

This ambiguity continues in one of the exhibition’s most deceptively simple works, the large neon sign of Les Survivants. The simple red lettering of the sign flickers, with the “sur” of “survivants” going in and out. A detail easily missed in The Sentinel delineates “les vivants” from “les survivants,” the living from the surviving. Cherri’s work shows the physical and mental torment of living in wartime, to be caught between existing as a body—without agency and subject to the judgements of the state—and existing as a human. It is a struggle that Cherri knows well: the artist came of age during the Lebanese Civil War, and his parents were killed in a 2024 Israeli bombing in Beirut. In a recent interview with Art in America, Cherri described himself as “a survivor,” in part attributing his resilience to his upbringing in Lebanon:

The worse things are, the more we hold on to life and have fun—even if it’s excessive, even if it’s seen as a sick way of dealing with reality. But survival isn’t an intellectual thing, not really. It’s instinctual.1

The Sentinel and “Last Watch Before the Dawn” make clear that there is no living, only surviving, while this cycle of violence continues.