Ali Cherri talks to artifacts. Or perhaps, they talk to him. Either way, he knows – instantly and intuitively – what to do with them: ‘I learnt not to question my instinct and just go with it,’ he says. In the same way that a farmer might graft a cutting from a lemon to an orange tree and create a hybrid citrus, the Lebanese Paris-based artist grafts artifacts onto one another to create ‘a solidarity between broken bodies.’ It is his own version of selective breeding. In Cherri’s hands, race, gender, geography, and era become irrelevant. The Lebanese artist sees a cooperative spirit in these objects – a commune of beings who all share the experience of hardship. Is it pain that brings them together? ‘We all come with our baggage, we meet the other who has lived through the same experiences, and then we create a community of survivors,’ says Cherri.

The artist is exhibiting some of these pieces across 24 vitrines as part of the ‘Body and Soul’ exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris (until August 25, 2025). The 19th-century glass boxes feature text lifted from the script of Jean Cocteau’s film, Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet). In one scene of the 1930 movie, an artist is surprised to see the mouth on the face that he has just sketched move. The scene is eerily redolent of Cherri’s selective breeding; after all, like Cocteau’s character, he animates lifeless objects.

Cherri started to acquire the artifacts that form the basis of his sculpture a little over a decade ago at French auction house Drouot. The artist says his purchases were not particularly valuable; they had been ‘left out of dominant history and [were] not found in museums.’ They are, however, incredibly diverse – from human remains and sarcophagi to masks, mummies, and more – and span centuries. In a process that he calls ‘grafting or assemblage,’ Cherri reinvents them. ‘I’m just being receptive,’ he says matter-of-factly. It is not ‘breathing new life into,’ nor is it some divine power of (re)creation, but rather a reclamation of justice and pride.

The artist has long been fascinated with the idea of the auction house. ‘It’s a representation in how desire fluctuates in real time: the more something is desired, the higher the price, otherwise it goes back to storage,’ he explains. ‘The concept of desire becomes a political question – we put desire around objects, that’s our consumerist society. Historic objects are part of this desire. I question all structures of power and the writing of history, because the latter becomes problematic.’

We might be tempted to see Cherri’s method as a clever form of artistic witchcraft: his artworks are undoubtedly spooky, (some even spook him out, especially the taxidermy), but that is no indication of his own mindset. He convincingly and humorously promises that the work ‘is much darker than I am.’ In one piece on show at the Bourse de Commerce, a pair of coins dangle from strings connected to the eye sockets of an eyeless 14th-15th century stone head that sits on a plaster bust (The Man with Tears, 2023). In another, he has placed the iron horns of a ram from Mali on the face of a clay figure (The Dreamer, 2023). Elsewhere, Cherri has half-buried bull horns in sand, placed them under the compassionate gaze of a towering ancient Egyptian figure, and called the whole Gilgamesh (The Death of Enkidu) (2023); in another, he has given a lion’s bronze paws to a clay eagle (Monument to Rust, 2024). The disproportionate Divination (2023) features a 17th-century marble woman’s face atop a Roman marble fragment with curious-looking feet – really they are metal percussion instruments from the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt (c.1077–664 BC). Suddenly, they all look like they were once real beings – and viewers are turned into fans of The Lord of the Rings who believe that the epic truly happened (didn’t it?).

What is more, in the process, these artifacts become museum-worthy contemporary artworks.

Cherri is all too aware of this. In fact, it is partly his intention. There is something romantic about his desire to ‘rescue and resuscitate’ broken and neglected objects that have not made their way into the great canons of art history or museology. ‘I bring them back inside the museum – not in a history museum but in a contemporary museum, as intruders,’ he says. ‘They make the history more complex, and I’m just the vessel that brings them.’

Many of Cherri’s sculptures, installations, and films address the heart-wrenching scenes the artist witnessed during the Lebanese wars. During our interview, he recalls distressing memories of growing up in war-torn Lebanon in the 1980s, and singles out a school trip in 1991 to the National Museum of Beirut. With the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, the capital was divided into East and West Beirut, and the museum stood on the demarcation line. ‘So, the museum itself became a witness to the violence,’ explains Cherri, who was about 15 when he made the trip that also marked his first museum experience. To protect the artifacts, museum officials stored some in the basement that was walled up, while other larger objects were covered with concrete and wood. ‘I was looking at cement blocks that had an image taped on them indicating what was inside,’ recalls Cherri. ‘There was an act of faith that you had to have that what you’re not seeing is actually there, so there was a suspension of belief. The experience was a starting point for me of looking at how artifacts literally disappear and retreat from violence.’ A sensitivity towards museography and museums as sites of historical narrative, and also of trauma, was born. It spurred a continued interest in which ‘broken objects’ endured and how they go on to produce meaning. Museums, says Cherri, are ‘sites of ideology, power, and producers of stories that we have to question.’

But does the artifact dictate the story or did Cherri impose his story on the artifact? He laughs. ‘I let them talk and I listen,’ he says. ‘I feel what they need and what is missing. Sometimes they stay with me for years before I make something from them.’ Ultimately, believes Cherri, as a creative, it is a precious thing to hold what someone made by hand thousands of years ago. ‘That’s how you inscribe yourself in a lineage, it’s humanity’s heritage,’ he adds.

In January, Cherri found an ancient Egyptian mask at auction that was listed as having been owned by Jean Cocteau. After questioning its provenance, the auction shared an invoice dated from 1934 that certifies Cocteau’s sale of the mask, presumably to raise funds for his next film. The face in Le Sang d’un poète is based on the mask, and the mask is now in Cherri’s possession. It has joined the other ‘community members’ that sit on the purgatorial studio shelf awaiting transformation and staring at him all day – except that this one, Cherri says, ‘I’ll keep for myself.’