Joachim Froese & Andre Penteado | Archive / Dad's Suicide

Andre Penteado

Joachim Froese

This exhibition brings together two photographers whose work is concerned with the process following the death of a parent. Taking different approaches to a very sensitive subject, the making of the projects was a type of therapy for the photographers as they dealt with the sense of loss and grief.

Andre Penteado’s work concerns the effect his dad’s suicide had on him. His father, Jose Octavio, took his own life in January 2007, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, at the age of 72. Andre had been living in London for a year at the time, and his only contact with him had been through email and the telephone. “After his suicide I felt very guilty and lonely. A sense of failure and a feeling that I could have done something to prevent what happened overtook me. I felt a lot of anger towards him as well. I couldn’t believe what he had done to himself and to all of us who loved him so much.”

 As a reaction to his father’s death, Andre began creating photographic works. Firstly, he photographed his dad’s funeral. Shortly after, he took all his father’s clothes to a studio and photographed himself wearing them; a way of getting close to him for a final time after a year without any physical contact. Then he photographed the empty hangers, as an expression of the emptiness and loneliness he was feeling. On his return to London, Andre kept a visual diary, using a digital point and shoot. All four projects will be displayed in the exhibition, a testament to the process of mourning a loved one.

Andre has exhibited his work both in the UK and Brazil, and has had work featured in Source Magazine and the British Journal of Photography. He is based in London.

Joachim Froese’s Archive are constructed images of books and china left from the estate of his deceased German mother. Arranging the objects in stacks, which are then assembled into tableaux of seemingly precarious towers, Froese is creating his own archive of his mother’s possessions, which seemed so unfamiliar to him when they were removed from the context of her house. The work is a comment on the nature of the archive, on the personal possessions we collect in order to construct our own history and preserve our past. The images depict imaginary scenarios which present only an illusion of stability and rationality, when in fact the structures we build in our memory are as unsound as the ones depicted in the work.

Joachim, who grew up in Germany, is an art photographer who divides his time between Brisbane, Australia, where he is lecturer in photography at the Queensland College of Art, and Berlin. He has exhibited internationally and his work is in a number of public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia. This is his first exhibition in the UK.