Fear of  began in a Darlinghurst laneway in Sydney as a series of street posters declaring the artist's fears. In response to this public artwork, members of the public were able to share their fears anonymously through an online survey. The artist made some of these fears public on a series of billboards at The Substation in Melbourne in 2014. In 2019, documentation from the Darlinghurst series was exhibited in On Vulnerability & Doubt, curated by Max Delany at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). To coincide with this exhibition the artist opened yet another survey to collect more fears. To date there are over 400 fears entered into the Fear of database. 

From On Vulnerability & Doubt

"Fahd’s 2011 Fear of series can be considered a self-portrait of sorts. Fahd developed a series of personal written disclosures that she pasted up as street posters, projecting the artist’s private fears into public space. While the scale of the paper sheets and texts reflect ‘how loud or how quiet’ Fahd’s fears were at the time, she also notes that the words are typed rather than handwritten so as not to appear diaristic, and thus tap into both the personal and collective. As an articulation of the generalised anxieties that we carry as individuals and the relations of the individual to the body politic, Fahd’s project reflects on the cultivation of fear and shame in social space and public discourse. Whilst her posters were only temporary public interventions into the public sphere, her project is a carefully crafted provocation to empathy that makes clear the ways in which attitudes such towards fear and shame, for better and worse, can so easily become socially entrenched."  

Artist Interviews: On Vulnerability & Doubt