Cherine Fahd

Cherine Fahd is an Australian artist who works in photography and video performance. She is also Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and has published in academic journals, photographic and art publications, and in news and media. Her work has been shown in Australia, Israel, Greece and Japan. She has received numerous grants, and has been awarded residencies in India and in Sydney at Carriageworks.

Early life and education Fahd was born in Sydney Australia in 1974, where her grandfather and his brothers migrated from Lebanon in the 1950s. At age 11 her teacher took her class to an exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She says that from then on, her focus was on art, and she often faked dentist appointments to skip school and go to the gallery.

She was awarded a PhD from Monash University in 2016 and is an Associate Professor and Director of Photography at the University of Technology, Sydney. "I am interested in the way photography, in terms of portraiture, presents an appearance, how we appear to others. This appearance is a signifier of so many things such as race for example. This in and of itself points to photography’s history as a tool used to classify people." Other series shown since 2000 include Sleepers, Camouflage, and National Types of Beauty.

In 2003–2004, while in Paris, Fahd captured a series of individuals against a stone wall. There was a heat wave and the city installed sprinklers, and the photographs show various reactions.

In 2011, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Australia, Fahd led a program to share her fears and asked visitors to share theirs. She then created posters of text to present the fears.

For Shadowing Portraits (2014–2015) Fahd asked practitioners working in photography to sit for portraits. She asked each subject to strike a pose and then copied the pose behind them. In essence, she was hiding herself as the photograph was of herself, hidden by the sitter. The series was part of her PhD work.

In 2016–2017 Fahd produced the Series You Look like..., a series of photographs of 12 men with beards. Two were of her brothers, often asked by their mother to shave off their beards because, as Lebanese men, they looked like terrorists. Other photographs were of men of different heritage. Fahd's series raises questions about how we judge people by their appearances. The funeral occurred when Fahd was two years old. The photographs and annotations make public visual and private expressions of grief. The viewer becomes involved. The deceased is never seen, only the mourners who are individually identified in the annotations. As the series progresses, her own comments became increasingly personal until she began to use children's intimate names for grandmother, the widow. Following its presentation at Carriageworks, the series was acquired for the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Publications Fahd has had two books published of her work by M.33 Melbourne, A Portrait is a Puzzle (2017) and Apókryphos (2019) which won the Australia New Zealand Photobook Award.

Her writing has been published on The Conversation, ABC News and SBS and academic journals. 2004: Fahd won the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts Photography Award. 2018: Awarded the Asialink Creative Exchange residency to Varanasi, India. While there, she focused on how the expressions of the human face signal identity. 2019: Selected for The National: New Australian Art. 2019: Awarded artist in residence at The Clothing Store at Carriageworks. Haifa Museum of Art, Israel National Gallery of Victoria