Gianni Manhattan is pleased to present Autonomous Gestures, Marina Faust’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. 
Marina Faust’s multi-faceted artistic practice utilises documentary photography, filmmaking, sculpture and collage to enter questions about identity, the self, subjectivity and alienation. Her works often delineate from a classical understanding of photographic or painterly portraiture, opting instead for a psychological representation that is deeply rooted in dissonance, the contradictions of decision making or the fortitude of time.
For Autonomous Gestures, Faust contrasts vintage photographic prints from the 1980’s with her most recent series, Ambulant – large scale prosthetic chandeliers, which are restrained within a metal framework. 
Faust’s reconstructed chandeliers evoke an industrial, medical or even retrofuturistic aesthetic, mocking the Biedermeier conservatism often associated with decadent furnishings. Commonly the static centrepiece in a bourgeoise household, Faust’s reconfigured chandeliers are mobile, autonomous and sovereign. Following the logic of her Traveling Chairs and Rolling Stools, the new series of mobile sculptures enables an emancipation of a utilitarian design object. Faust’s reimagined forms are assembled from components of different chandeliers, igniting the otherwise conservative appearance of chandeliers with a monstrous, resilient and imaginative configuration.
There is another act of splitting and reconfiguring that first appeared in Faust’s photographic miniatures in the 1980’s. This series of hand printed photographs were defined by the smallest possible format her photographic enlarger would allow. Each image is constructed by one hand photographing the other hand in the midst of a mundane task, such as eating, speaking on the phone, reading a book. This form of ‘dedoublement’, splitting an action into two autonomous actions, one hand photographing, the other one ‘doing’ predates contemporary selfies and imbues Faust’s portraiture with an estranged sense of witnessing. They illustrate the plasticity of psyche and how a persons actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs can hold two opposing or contradicting states.