Kayte talks with Leila Reichert, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Eskenazi Museum, about the latest exhibition in the Time-based Media Gallery called Of Men Gods and Mud. It’s a three-channel video installation by the Lebanese artist Ali Cherri. The 2022 piece is part of a larger work focused on a group of young men making mud bricks along the banks of the Nile in Northern Sudan. The simple, hand and body labor of mixing mud, shaping bricks, drying bricks, baking them in primitive kilns takes place in the shadow of the Merowe Dam. The construction of the dam displaced more the 50,000 people and altered the landscape and lifeways of the people in the region. Overlaying the lush cinematography are female voices in French, Arabic and English reflecting on myths of Gods crafting humans from mud.
The exhibit opens October 18, 2025.
