Dennis Del Favero
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Statement
Dennis Del Favero (born 1953) is an Australian photographic, video and new media artist and academic. He has been awarded numerous Artist-in-Residencies and Fellowships, including an Artist-in-Residence at ZKM, Karlsruhe (since 2000) and an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship (2005-2010). He is Chair and Co-Director of the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research and Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Del Favero was born in Sydney of Italian migrants. He completed undergraduate and postgraduate studies in philosophy, visual arts and media arts at the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and the University of Technology, Sydney.
Del Favero's work explores different forms of memory. His photographic work investigates the imaginary recollections of sexuality, his video work the connection between trauma and recent history, his new media work the nexus between remembrance and digital transactions (1).
Del Favero utilises these different media to evoke the ways in which memories, like pentimenti, endure beyond attempts to destroy them. Pentimenti, a term used in art conservation, refers to the visible trace of an earlier painting beneath a layer of paint on a canvas typically found during restoration or x-ray (2). His work is particularly interested in how memories, like pentimenti, reveal themselves as involuntary embodiments of the past in the present, determining the imaginary and actual relationships between human subjects and the world (3). In recent work he has focused on how one might live in a world increasingly haunted by its past (4; 5).
His work has been extensively exhibited internationally in individual exhibitions for museums and galleries such as Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Munich, ViaFarini, Milan and Neue Galerie, Graz and included in group exhibitions such as Kriegszustand, Battle of the Nations War Memorial, Leipzig 1996, Future Cinema, ZKM, Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2003, Cinemas du futur, Euralille, 2004, Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2005, Artescienza: Spazio deformato, Casa dell'Architettura, Rome, 2006, Biennial of Australian Art, AGSA, 2008, International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville, 2008.
Notes
(1). Ross Gibson (ed), Reverberation: Remembrance and the Moving Image (Exh Cat). Melbourne: Australian Centre for the Moving Image, 2003, p. 53
(2). The New Oxford Dictionary of English
(3). Jill Bennett, Dennis Del Favero: Fantasmi. Sydney and Hannover: UNSW Press and Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2004, p. 80
(4). Jill Bennett, T_Visionarium: A User's Guide. Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2007, p. 39
(5). Sabine Sielke, Surfacing Depths, in D.Del Favero, U. Frohne and P. Weibel (eds), Un_Imaginable. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008, p. 19