Adham Faramawy
b. 1981
Adham Faramawy works across media including moving image, sculptural installation, photography, painting and wall-based works to engage with concerns about materiality, touch, and toxic embodiment in order to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities. Works such as ‘Skin Flick’ (2019) take the body as a starting point, using skin as a site to explore ideas of borders, boundaries, and fluid subjectivity. These ideas leak out into Faramawy’s wall-based works such as their series ‘The stickiness of an unclean break’ (2020).
That consideration of fluidity develops into investigations of the relationship between social and ecological abjection in installations such as ‘The air is subtle, various and sweet’ (2021). This work begins with a consideration of what is termed 'natural' and what termed 'invasive' in ecology in order to open up meditations on the subject positions of migrants and refugees.
How ‘host’ nations live with those others underpins other works such as ‘Proposal for a parakeet’s garden’ as well as the paintings that Faramawy makes. Faramawy’s works can be understood as being in conversation with each other through the different mediums they take, where the artist offers a multiplicity of voices to speculate on desire, identities and how we live in our bodies, with others (both people and other species) and in this world in a way that transcends heteronormative, masculinist and white hierarchies.
Adham Faramawy is an artist of Egyptian descent based in London. They have had screenings at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London; Serpentine Gallery, London and Serpentine Ecologies Symposia, London. They have had recent exhibitions at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Arts, London (group), Somerset House, London (group), Buffalo University Gallery, Buffalo (group); the Bemis Center, Omaha (group); Niru Ratnam Gallery, London (solo), and Cell Projects, London (solo). They were shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award 2021 and 2017. Adham is the recipient of the Frieze London Artist Award 2023.