Another citation (1. A body is a collection of pieces)

Cherine Fahd is an academic and an artist based in Sydney who has been working across photography, video, and performance since 1999. Fahd is interested in photography as a social practice, and she explores the capacity of the camera to unite people and navigate relationships. Throughout her practice, Fahd has utilised public and private photographic archives as well as shooting her own images to explore notions of identity, intimacy, social connection, and perceptions of beauty. Fahd creates photographic-based works that carry emotive connotations that transcend their own specificity.

In this work we see two bodies submerged in water; one head bobbing up and down on the surface, one pair of arms flailing. It’s hard to tell whether they’re drowning or playing. This image is steeped with immediacy, it reminds us of how the world can change in an instant. This sense of instability feels familiar in the context of a global pandemic, where everything is balancing on a razor’s edge.

Whether waving or floundering the hands in this scene possess dramatic force. It’s an apt evocation of the contemporary moment as we endure the Covid-19 pandemic. Hands have become symbolically loaded, not simply because they can transmit disease, but because they also enable connection. We feel the significance of touch in its absence; we sense its offer of salvation more acutely when it’s denied. In this work, lonely hands reach out, seeking reciprocal gestures to rescue them from the deep.