Dennis Del Favero
Memory, loss, trauma, conflict and violence pervade the work of the Sydney-based artist, Dennis Del Favero. Del Favero often draws upon real events in his photographic and video works. The photographic installation, Prima Facie (1993), was developed in response to a police report on the murder of a photographer in Sydney, and the series Motel Vilina Vlas (1995) (named after one of the forty-two rape camps that have been documented in the former Yugoslavia since 1991) grapples with issues of rape in Bosnia.
Del Favero’s photographs speak to the lived experience of trauma and are frequently grounded in the body. Parting Embrace (1997) is an erotically-charged series of photographs that explores the clash of fantasy, fear and trauma in a boy’s sexual awakening. Filtered by sexual fantasy and myth, the painful reality of trauma surfaces only in fragments.
