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MOMENTUM AiR
Henri Cash-Finlay
Fading Myths
MOMENTUM Artist Residency
Open Studio Exhibition
At GAD, Freienwalder Str. 30, 13359 Berlin-Wedding
Opening
Friday 27 Feb, 7 – 11pm
Viewing by appointment from 28 Feb – 8 March
Contact: henri_cash-finlay@hotmail.com
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In a new methodology of working developed during his Artist Residency at MOMENTUM, Australian artist Henri Cash-Finlay employs the process of photo-degradation as a deliberate and generative method of art making. Drawing from his photographic practice, Cash-Finlay subjects painted surfaces to prolonged exposure to light, using bespoke machinery he has meticulously designed to denature pigment through controlled exposure to ultraviolet light. The resulting works undergo a transformation akin to material sunburn: images bleach, fracture, and fade, leaving behind surfaces marked by time, exposure, and vulnerability. The resulting body of work occupies a threshold between painting and photography, where images are neither fixed nor fully erased, but instead exist in a state of continual material negotiation.
Referred to by the artist as complex anthotypes, these works position light not as a tool of illumination but as an active agent of erosion and change. Rather than preserving the image, Cash-Finlay allows it to deteriorate, foregrounding degradation as both an aesthetic and conceptual force. The works resist fixity, embracing entropy, erosion, and instability as generative conditions within the act of making. In doing so, the artist challenges dominant cultural values that privilege permanence, control, and archival longevity, proposing instead an understanding of art as contingent, temporal, and materially alive.
Cash-Finlay’s practice is informed by his experience as an Australian artist, where the intensity of sunlight, landscape, and climate are inseparable from broader histories of colonial occupation and cultural inscription. His unique process of image-making draws attention to the environmental and cultural conditions shaped by intense light and climate, opening a broader conversation on colonial identities and their inscriptions upon land, bodies, and images. The gradual bleaching and breakdown of pigment becomes both a material record and a conceptual gesture, echoing the ways histories are imposed, altered, and destabilised over time. The exhibition opens a space to consider degradation not as loss, but as a productive site of meaning, where exposure becomes a form of knowledge, and disappearance a mode of resistance.
These foundational studies function as a means of interrogating our expectations of permanence, authorship, and stability within art objects. With a measured provocation toward the institutional frameworks of conservation and preservation, complex anthotypes reframe impermanence not as a condition to be resisted, but rather positioning entropy, erosion, and transformation as a generative force within artistic production. By employing photographic erasure as a painterly strategy, Cash-Finlay situates his practice within the lineage of process art, applying natural phenomena as a critical tool to question, unsettle, and ultimately dispel the cultural and aesthetic institutional defaults that privilege control, endurance, and fixity. Cash-Finlay proposes, instead, an understanding of art as contingent, temporal, and materially alive.
-Rachel Rits-Volloch
With sincere thanks to GAD and Kolonie Wedding for hosting the exhibition
Artist Residency
1 March – 31 December 2025
ARTIST BIO
After graduating from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, with a bachelor’s degree in fine art (visual art) in 2017, Henri has spent the last half-decade working in remote Indigenous Art Centres across Australia. Primarily as a curator, Henri has produced exhibitions for most major Australian cities as well as internationally.
In 2024 Henri went on a sabbatical in Berlin, advocating for Indigenous artists and to solidify his own art practice.
Henri continues to be an avid supporter of the arts through his initiative AREA, established to provide space for artists to explore new methods of work not possible without additional resourcing. AREA is currently focused on supplementing Indigenous Australian Art Centres with curatorial, administrative and material support.
Ali Curung, silver gelatine print, 16.5 x 25 cm, 2023
Gustav at the Beach, silver gelatine print, 16.5×25 cm, circa 2022
Dad at the Wedding (detail), silver gelatine print, 15×10 cm, 2022
ARTIST STATEMENT
For this residency, I am interested in exploring the material conditions and cultural separations of the Australian nation-state and its structure as a “double nation”, so explored in historian Ian McLean’s book of the same name. In seeking to quantify the generative intersection of environment and genealogy and its subsequent sprouting of culture and personhood I have turned to documentary-style portraiture of my own family. There is an allocation of place or placement in the act of photography that I rely on to explore these ideas surrounding nationality in the context of this double nation.
The residency project will experiment with the process of photodegradation as a novel method of art making.
The material change of objects under intense sun exposure implicit in the process of photodegradation mimics the burning of European colonists in the severe Australian landscape. This rejection by the environment has become synonymous with contemporary Australian identity as exemplified in the 1904 poem My Country by Dorothea Mackellar detailing a “love for a sunburnt country”, a poem that has since instilled itself as part of Australia’s national consciousness.
It is in the combination of this novel process and through photographic placement that I continue my work exploring the duality of this double nation Australia.
– Henri Cash-Finlay
Yoghurt’s Arms, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2024
Jazz, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2019
Jazz Playing My Toy Accordion, 35mm film scan, dimensions variable, 2019
Dad and O’ in the Todd River, silver gelatine print, 25 x 18.75 cm, 2022
Frey at the Reptile Park, silver gelatine print, 15 x 10 cm, 2023
Bubble Work
