NOTABLE PAST CLUSTER P&P EXHIBITORS
THE SOUND OF THE HEART: DENISE FAIT
The 27-year-old Brazilian, Denise Fait, is well-versed in the ebb and flow of cinematic experience and creativity, finding success in cultural projects incorporating several artistic mediums both in Brazil and overseas.
A careerist from the age of 17, Fait began her creative endeavours as an assistant in audiovisual production, publicity, film festivals, music videos and short films. And by 2017 she upped sticks, moving to Rio De Janeiro as a production assistant in audiovisual projects. It was here that Denise Fait became managing partner of Fait Films, guiding artists and producing audiovisual and theatre projects.
During this time, Fait began experimenting with photography alongside her film work with the production company; this relationship with photography was cultivated whilst collaborating with artists and photographers, naturally colouring and influencing her still photography work. 2018 saw her embarking on a cultural exchange project with the Middle East, exporting prints to Egypt from Brazil. Presently, Fait is based in São Paolo, where she develops cultural projects in audiovisual, literature, fine arts and photography.
Naturally Fait’s photographs are impreganted with a cinematic touch; visually the pictures speak on a wider context or story, transposing a traditional black and white reportage aesthetic, to a contemporary storytelling motif. And as Susan Sontag pens ‘... photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal’. The aesthetic apparent in Fait’s work seems to travel beyond the real, into a dream-like place of Edenic, but uneasy proportions. Sontag further adds that photography is ‘A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.’ Fait’s photographs seem to limit experience, the snapshot, real aesthetic of documentary isn’t apparent here, rather, Fait’s photographs bring an air of craft, of tampering, and thus a souvenir — an extraordinarily beatified and enigmatic souvenir at that.
To further use Sontag’s words of influence on photography, the medium has become ‘one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.’ It’s here where Denise Fait’s cinematic photographs are most compelling. We’re invited to take the plunge so to speak, in participating in a visual performance and story, in the same way one would prepare the mind for a two hour feature-length film.
Through composition and layering, visual sense of time and place is skewed. The black and white photograph of the man in a christ redeemer pose seems to be in full-flight, hurtling towards the water. But after further inspection, it’s more plausible he’s about to engage in the dive. This clever play of angle and composition keeps the audience metaphorically on the edge of their seat, in the visual cinema of looking.
Principally, many of Fait’s works nod toward the experience of our poetic world, seen through the eyes of a conscientious and involved spirit.
Thank you for reading,
Cluster Team & Kieran McMullan.