This compelling work from Cherine Fahd’s Apókryphos series will be showing in Home’s ‘The Portrait’ exhibition opening next Wednesday.

Cherine Fahd is an artist, academic and writer working in the field of photography. Fahd holds a doctorate (PhD) from Monash University, Melbourne and is the Director of Photography at the University of Technology Sydney.

An extensive exhibition history has seen her work shown in major public institutions in Australia and internationally, with photographic work represented in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego and the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel.

Fahd is the recipient of numerous grants from the Australia Council for the Arts (2018, 2016, 2014, 2007, 2004, 2002, 1999) along with art awards and residencies such as the NSW Women & Arts Fellowship from Arts NSW (2005), Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts Photography Award (2004), National Photography Prize (2010) and the Moya Dyring Studio from the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2003).

Recently, Fahd was awarded the Asialink Creative Exchange (2018) to Varanasi, India. Her work on grief and mourning, Apókryphos (2019), was selected for The National 2019: New Australian Art and awarded a residency at The Clothing Store, both through Carriageworks.

Fahd has published two books, A Portrait is a Puzzle (2017) and Apókryphos (2019), both with M.33 Melbourne, publisher of contemporary Australian photography. Since 2017 she has also contributed to news media through The Conversation and subsequently to Fairfax, ABC news, and SBS, as well as publishing in scholarly journals such as Journal Visual Arts Practice and Journal of Photography and Culture.

“…there is an unwritten contract that grief is private, unphotographable. Even in the family album it is kept hidden. Family albums celebrate our moments of togetherness; birthdays, holidays and weddings as well as ordinary moments of domestic life. But what of death? What of images of grief and loss?

Apókryphos is a response to rare photographs from my family archive. In this series, I offer a forensic examination of mourning and the physical ways in which emotions are visualised, experienced and witnessed. Using image and text I have reproduced 24 photographs taken in 1975 of my Grandfather’s funeral and burial. Using a numerical system of annotations and footnotes, I forensically yet intimately guide you through the mysteries of the event portrayed, offering a visual and literary response to the photographs and to the unknown status of the photographer…”

Pictured is Apókryphos 1-1405, 2018/2019, Archival pigment print.