42 x 56 inches
Brigitte Mulholland is proud to present With Wit We Rise: The Fabulous Rebellion of the F.A.G., the first solo exhibition in Paris by New York–based artist Sean Fader. Part queer revolution, part campy space opera, and part mythic archive, Fader created a sprawling fictional story for this body of work: a 500 year long narrative that transforms the gallery into the pictorial record of the Federated American Globe (F.A.G.), an entirely queer planet with a dazzling intergalactic resistance group that fights against the tyranny of colonizing orange Cheezmalites with humor, strategy, and shade.
Through large-scale photographs and sculptural relics, Fader’s protagonists – Barbara the Warrior Princess; Claude Cahun, General of the Pink Pony Army; the resurrected Chevalier d’Éon; The Mommy Joan; The Daddy of the Dunes; The Daughter of Tides – wage a fabulous rebellion against the empire of Covfefe, a grotesque embodiment of cheeto-dusted toxic masculinity and authoritarian power. The resulting photographic tableaux fuse Enlightenment portraiture with sci-fi spectacle; drag pageantry with state propaganda. Every gesture is both a joke and an indictment – and a reminder that humor has always been a powerful queer weapon.
With Wit We Rise extends Fader’s long-standing exploration of how images perform history, queerness, desire, and violence. Across his career, he has transformed photography into a space of exchange, where performance, authorship, and intimacy converge. In this new chapter, Fader turns from the archive to the cosmos, imagining a future history in which queer survival is not tragedy but triumph: an uprising staged in both celebration and rage, where performance becomes both strategy and the fulfillment of a prophecy. The exhibition positions camp as a form of political clarity: laughter sharpened into resistance, sincerity refracted through spectacle. In Fader’s universe, the revolution is choreographed, mascaraed, and magnificently deliberate. The future, it turns out, is triumphantly fabulous.
