Soul Witness asks how power becomes embedded in bodies, objects and monuments. Soldiers appear not as heroic figures but as vulnerable individuals trapped inside structures of discipline and surveillance. Elsewhere, broken statues, mourners and unstable hybrid creatures challenge the apparent permanence of monuments and the historical narratives they are supposed to preserve.

Material is crucial. Cherri combines mud — fragile, impermanent and associated with the earth — with bronze, marble and ancient stone, materials traditionally linked to authority, monuments and cultural permanence. By allowing mud to undermine those supposedly stronger materials, he reverses the usual hierarchy between what institutions consider valuable and what they discard. Archaeological fragments acquired through markets and auctions also raise uncomfortable questions about displacement, collecting and the museum’s role in deciding how objects are interpreted.

Ali Cherri (b. 1976, Beirut) is a Lebanese visual artist and filmmaker whose practice moves between archaeology, political history, ecology and the body. Ruins and ancient objects recur throughout his work, not as passive remains of the past but as materials that continue to carry the consequences of violence and political authority. WIELS curator Helena Kritis frames this idea through Cherri’s recurring premise that matter itself can remember.