Ali Cherri and FIDH File Complaint With French War Crimes Unit as Raja Ravi Varma Sets $17.9M Record
A legal complaint filed in France and a record-setting sale in India are underscoring how tightly the art world’s public life is now braided with politics, accountability, and money.
On Thursday, French-Lebanese artist Ali Cherri (b. 1976) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) filed a complaint with the French War Crimes Unit against “unknown perpetrators,” denouncing the Israeli army’s bombing of civilian homes in Lebanon. The filing, directed to France’s specialized unit that handles war-crimes-related cases, seeks to trigger an investigation into strikes that the complainants say targeted non-military residences.
Cherri, whose work has often examined the afterlives of conflict through archaeology, museum display, and the politics of preservation, has in recent years become a prominent voice in conversations about cultural memory and state violence. The complaint marks a shift from the symbolic arena of exhibitions into the procedural language of courts, where questions of evidence, jurisdiction, and attribution are tested.
While the complaint points to Lebanon, the week’s other headline came from the auction room in India, where the market signaled its own kind of confidence. A painting by Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), titled “Yashoda and Krishna” (1890s), sold on Wednesday for $17.9 million with fees, setting a new auction record for a South Asian painting. The buyer was pharmaceuticals billionaire Cyrus Poonawalla.
The result exceeded the work’s $12.9 million high estimate and displaced the previous benchmark: a painting by Indian modernist MF Husain (1915–2011) that achieved $13.7 million with fees at Christie’s New York last year.
In a statement, Poonawalla described Varma’s painting as a “national treasure” and said he intends to ensure the public can view it “periodically.” The pledge gestures toward a familiar tension in trophy acquisitions: the private ownership that makes such purchases possible, and the public access that gives them cultural legitimacy.
Elsewhere, institutional politics continued to ripple through the international exhibition circuit. An open letter signed by 70 artists and curators participating in this year’s Venice Biennale calls for banning the US, Russia, and Israel from the event, a demand that places the Biennale’s long-standing national pavilion structure under renewed scrutiny.
In São Paulo, architecture and museum identity were also in focus, with the city’s Museum of Art (MASP) gaining a new extension project designed by Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992), the architect whose modernist vision has shaped the institution’s civic presence for decades.
In Washington, the White House immediately appealed a judge’s decision to stop construction on President Trump’s ballroom project, keeping the debate over federal architecture and oversight in motion.
And in Canada, La Biennale de Québec — featuring work by 60 international artists through April 19 — is framing ice as both metaphor and material under the theme “Briser la glace/Splitting Ice,” a curatorial premise that reads differently in an era of climate anxiety.
Finally, a quieter but telling shift arrived in art media: Adrian Searle, the Guardian’s chief art critic since 1996, is stepping down. In reflections shared at the close of his tenure, Searle described the way decades of looking can compress into what he called a “watery blur,” and admitted to a persistent sense of imposter syndrome — a rare public acknowledgment of doubt from a critic whose authority has long been taken for granted.
Taken together, the week’s developments sketch a portrait of an art ecosystem that is no longer content to stay in its lanes. Whether through legal filings, auction-room records, or institutional petitions, the field is increasingly negotiating what it means to witness, to own, and to represent — and who gets to set the terms.
