Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art (NYC): Ali Cherri and Guillaume Dénervaud

This museum is completely free! Check the schedule online www.swissinsti... It's worth a visit when you visit New York City.
Swiss Institute presents Humble and quiet and soothing as mud, Ali Cherri’s first solo exhibition in the United States, which pivots on mud as the primordial material of civilization in creation myths, cultural artifacts and ecology.
From ancient Sumerian mythology to Jewish folklore, Maori and Chinese creation myths to Hindu and Yoruba cosmogony, humankind has time and again been narrativized as originating from mud. Houses, pots, and other vessels made from clay were instrumental to the beginnings of societies, as they were used for cooking, heating and gathering food. It is from the aqueous solution covering the Earth, where water and soil met, that the first single-celled organisms emerged, birthing every living creature on Earth today.
On the first floor of Humble and quiet and soothing as mud, a newly commissioned sculptural installation is fleetingly animated by a choreography of moving lights, retelling the myth of Gilgamesh in a scene surrounding the fabled figure with other characters from the epic poem. In Mesopotamian mythology, Gilgamesh’s rival-turned-companion Enkidu is formed from clay and water to help the semi-mythic king of Uruk on his ventures to achieve immortality. The bodies of Cherri’s sculptures are composed of mud, with masks and fragments of found objects serving as their faces. Cherri buys these sculptural fragments in auctions, where prices fluctuate with changing desires for the objects on sale, mirroring their economic value as cultural artifacts and their political potency in recent discussions of reparations. These objects, which are often forged and then smuggled abroad, are less a question of cultural authenticity for Cherri than about the perpetuation of a lived tradition - an unfixing of these objects from the grips of archaeological time. Yet mud is the material that best preserves archeological finds. What memories might be held by its shifting topographies?
Featured on the second floor is Cherri’s celebrated three-channel video installation Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022), for which he was awarded the Silver Lion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Shot at the Merowe Dam on the Nile River in Northern Sudan, the camera follows a group of brick makers as they shape these fundamental building materials from mud.
Ali Cherri (b. Beirut, Lebanon) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Paris.
Swiss Institute is pleased to present Ozoned Station, an exhibition by Guillaume Dénervaud (b. 1987, Fribourg, CH). Dénervaud’s works are often composed in dense, though congruous, arrangements of ambiguous motifs that evoke plant matter, machine parts or cellular structures. Anchored by a sequence of gateway-like paintings, Ozoned Station features visions of systems and environments that collapse distinctions between the organic and the built, the microscopic and the galactic, the future and the past. Comprised of new work, this exhibition marks the artist’s first in a U.S. institution.
Techniques of worldbuilding used in fantasy and science fiction films and literature, including the works of Mark von Schlegell, Renee Gladman and Hayao Miyazaki, are of interest to Dénervaud, whose paintings and drawings often allude to the transfer of energy and the development life forms, or what life might regenerate following catastrophe. To develop these bio-machinic fantasia, Dénervaud uses architectural drafting stencils now rendered obsolete by computer-aided design programs, applying vivid color via pigments made from the exoskeletons of insects, minerals, and plants, amongst other organic materials.
A residue coats the walls of the gallery. Evocative of the sticky dust that accumulates in an urban tunnel or on subway platforms, this patina is made by mixing paint with umber, a natural pigment whose artistic uses date to Neolithic cave painting, which is today burnt in coal-fired power plants to produce electricity. In the adjacent hallway and stairwell, hand-blown glass lanterns, like extracted organs or abandoned planets, hang loose from the ceiling and glow.
Guillaume Dénervaud (b. 1987, Fribourg, Switzerland) lives and works in Paris.
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