THE DIGGER

Join us for a conversation between artist and filmmaker Ali Cherri and museum's director Karina El Helou, focusing on Cherri's Telluric Trilogy which is composed of three films: The Disquiet (2013), The Digger (2015), and his latest long-feature The Dam (2022).

The conversation will be preceded by a screening of The Digger  (2015). 

The Digger
Dir. Ali Cherri, 2015
24', produced by Sharjah Art Foundation
Arabic and Pashto with English subtitles

Shot in the Sharjah desert in the United Arab Emirates, The Digger follows the everyday life of Sultan Zeib Khan, the Pakistani caretaker who has been guarding the ruins of a Neolithic necropolis for twenty years. A witness to the nation’s founding mythologies, Sultan preserves archeological ruins, keeping them from falling into ruin. In the midst of these empty graves that echo the vastness of the desert, the absence of corpses is more unsettling than their presence.

Through the Telluric Trilogy, Ali Cherri examines different geographies of violence, identifying how violent crises are inscribed in particular environments, and how scrutinizing these carefully enough can make tangible the way political, social and geopolitical events are embedded in the elements, even if not necessarily explicit. This constitutes an entry point to history through the materiality it produces. 

Ali Cherri (born in 1976, Lebanon) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Paris. He was the 2021 Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, which resulted in the exhibition If you prick us, do we not bleed?. He is the winner of the Silver Lion Award for the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale. His first feature film, The Dam, premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2022.

The event is organized in collaboration with MC Distribution.