“I am not a slow learner
I am a quick forgetter
such erasing makes one voracious
if you teach me something beautiful
I will name it quickly before it floats away”
― Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf

The idea of “making sense” is often associated with a process of a forward projection. But the process of trying to plan a life, understanding the world that surrounds us is not a deliberate look into the future, but rather the pain staking process of using fragments of memory and experience to extrapolate a sense or orientation for the future and the present.
   For her third solo exhibition at GIANNI MANHATTAN, Marina Faust combines different bodies of works which, even though made in different periods, equally use the methodology of looking backwards in order to understand the present. In Reverse, Faust presents previously unseen black and white photographic prints from the 1980s with a large-scale reconstructed, prosthetic chandelier, suspended within a metal framework and a new series of pendant sculptures.
   For the past five years Marina Faust has been revisiting her photographic archive. Vintage silver gelatine prints and photographic negatives were utilised as her subject and Faust rephotographed and scanned this collection of imagery, ensuring to change or enlarge her rediscovered source material. This way of treating the analogue photograph as the digital subject changes the narrative of Faust’s imagery and, conceptually, historicises their own making. Faust used this process of revisiting on the prints shown in In Reverse: Selecting photos from a series of scanned black and white photos from the 1980s which are printed onto large format water colour paper. The porcelain colour and uneven texture of this paper, coupled with the revisited print render Faust’s sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete images in an enigmatic feeling of being untethered from their making and their timeline.
   Marina Faust’s ambulant series consists of large-scale reconstructed, prosthetic and battery powered chandeliers, suspended within a metal framework. Commonly the static centrepiece in a bourgeois household, Faust’s reconfigured chandeliers are assembled from salvaged components, igniting their otherwise conservative appearance with a monstrous, resilient and inventive configuration. For her new and limited series ambulant (Lob.), Faust collaborated with world renown glass chandelier maker Lobmeyr, repurposing discarded elements of their chandeliers, such as the iconic Sputnik lights, designed by Hans Harald Rath for the opening of the Met Opera in 1966. Using the metal inner workings of vintage chandeliers or their most camp and decorative glass elements, the new series of mobile sculptures are bound to a steel base on wheels with a light that is suspended from an armature.
   Faust’s approach at galvanising different epochs, styles and materials enable objects and her images to have a second life and be reincarnated from their storage systems.