David Fathi

His work, made of still or moving images, takes its root from various archives and visual databases, depending on the subject, blurring the appropriationist work in the boundaries between documentary and contemporary art. With an intense passion for odd and conflicting facts, David Fathi often tackles them with a biting sense of humor. He hijacks images and reveals gaps and absurdities in the stories he recounts: a subversive visual critique.

David Fathi pulls back the curtain, to open up meaning to what is behind the scenes : to counteract documented proof as much as to create new information. At the crossroads of solemnity, banalty and absurdity, his images assert themselves as political.[…] Might David Fathi be trying to reintroduce a spark of idealism in our current cynicism ?

From document to a politic of image, by Aurélie Cavanna, January 2019

THE DEAD GOVERN THE LIVING

A hundred and fifty years ago Auguste Comte imagines a utopian project for society which he names Positivism, where past feeds the present to create a future where order and progress reign.

Comte would say “The dead govern the living”. For him it is the best of the dead that lives on. Society makes progress through the accumulated knowledge of those before us. This quote may seem ambiguous, but it is idealistic in Comte’s mind.

A hundred and fifty years later we are in a standstill. A post capitalist society lamenting not being able to imagine a better future. We see history as a never-ending cycle; rise of fascism, increasing economic inequalities, atomic threat. Our popular culture is filled with dystopias (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, Black Mirror). For modern iconoclastic thinkers like Hito Steyerl or Adam Curtis our society has become a zombie culture, repeating and feeding onto itself without end in sight.

We do not see anymore “The dead govern the living” as positive. The dead seem to govern us, as a past overbearing the present and hindering us from imagining a better future.

Is Auguste Comte’s vision out of date? Have we proven that the arrow of progress is in fact a never ending circle? Or are we blocked in a cycle because we have abandoned a certain form of idealism?

The critique might be made against our own self-delusion.

The site-specific work created for the Maison Auguste Comte is a confrontation between Comte’s idealism and the current cynicism. Utopia versus Dystopia. Found footage of bareknuckle brawls between politicians are the starting point of this confrontation. The current political dead-end is shown in a never-ending video loop, a formless suit-and-tie zombie mass. These governing living-dead contrast and contaminate the preserved apartment of the philosopher, still filled with relics of an idealistic past.

Video extract on Vimeo

WOLFGANG

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, was nicknamed the “Conscience of Physics”. But he was also known among his peers for something a bit less scientific.

Legend says that when Pauli entered a room, experiments would fail and machinery would break down. His colleagues jokingly called this phenomenon “The Pauli Effect”.

Even though this was a private joke among highly scientific minds, some of them were nonetheless superstitious enough to ban Wolfgang Pauli from even entering their lab.

CERN recently released their photo archive spanning thirty years of cutting edge research. Wolfgang Pauli died shortly before this archive started but his presence still lingers; on a bust, a blackboard, a portrait, a book etc. Thus starts this “scientific ghost story” where maybe even accidents and strange events are also a reminder of Pauli’s existence. Some images are manipulated by the artist, while others are left untouched. Art, photography, history and science collide, blurring the line between science fact and science fiction. The mystery and humor arise from the playful games the reader must take part in, to separate myth from reality.