BIOGRAPHY
Cherine Fahd was born in Sydney in 1974. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours in 1997 and in 2003 a Master of Fine Arts by research, both at the University of New South Wales, College of Fine arts. Fahd’s work is represented in major public collections in Australia such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria. She is the recipient of numerous New Work grants from the Australia Council for the Arts along with art awards such as the NSW Women & Arts Fellowship from Arts NSW and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts Photography Award. Her work is represented by Gitte Weise Galerie, Berlin.
After having studied to be a painter Fahd turned her eye to photography. Her early photographs reflect an interest in the relationship between objects-sculpture, performance and documentation. Beginning with operation nose nose operation 1999/2000, I Begged the Wind to Blow 2000, Idea of the Sphere 2001/2002 and A Women Runs 2002. However in 2003 during a three month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, her work deviated from these purely staged scenes to capturing what presented itself on the streets of cities such as Paris, Berlin and Sydney. This saw the creation of The Chosen 2003 and subsequently similar works such as Looking Glass 2004/2005 and Trafalgar Square 2006/2007.
Her current work "Hiding" Self-Portraits 2009-2010 sees a return to the masked scenes of her early photographs in that they are sculptural constructions that reflect her ongoing interest in the relationship of performance and sculpture in photography. They turn the conventional notion of portraiture into a chronological, surreal, oddity through the hiding of the face; taking "the self" out of the portrait.
Fahd's photographs explore the interplay between everyday reality and a reconstruction of it. Her images are documentary in nature yet they are deliberately misleading. By capturing "what is there" in front of her she fabricates an image that maintains a strange and surreal quality. Finally, their peculiarity relies on the ability of the camera to both capture and create simultaneously, to both document and fictionalise.