Ali Cherri wants to change how you think about mud. It’s much more than a nuisance you track across the floor on a rainy day. In ancient societies, mud was used to make pots, weapons, houses, and other objects essential to a people’s survival. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story, Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu is originally crafted from mud. Even further back, in primordial times, the first single-celled organism was formed in the fertile meeting point between water and soil. Cherri, a Lebanese visual artist and filmmaker, incorporates archaeological finds purchased at auctions into his humanoid mud sculptures, which dominate the first floor of this exhibition. On the second floor, a video installation titled Of Men and Gods and Mud (2022) depicts a group of brick makers on the shore of the Nile, in the shadow of the controversial Merowe Dam in Northern Sudan. Conscious of both contemporary environmental issues and ancestral histories, Cherri highlights the allegorical complexities of that most basic substance, mud. —Paulina Prosnitz