Adham Faramawy: And these deceitful waters

2 Oct 2024-4 Jan 2025

Overview

Focal Point Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Adham Faramawy, featuring two recent moving image pieces and a work on the Big Screen Southend. Recent works have delved into the hidden histories of rivers, particularly the Thames, and other waterways, revealing their roles as politically contested sites throughout time. Through poetic exploration, Faramawy’s pieces highlight the complex interplay of migration, colonial history, and ecological change, inviting viewers to engage with these themes.

Shown at Focal Point Gallery for the first time, Birds of Sorrow, 2024, is a film installation that brings together the social and political histories of the waterways and surroundings of Dagenham, the birds that live along the river, mythology, and the changing ecology of the area.

And these deceitful waters, the work that lends its name to the exhibition, was initially commissioned as part of the Frieze Artist Award in 2023. This piece, comprised of a video and sculptural assemblage, intertwines history, mythology, and a poetic sensibility. The Thames, once revered as a “mighty god,” serves as the work’s starting point. Its tributaries, forcibly driven underground, the river transformed into a “colonial artery” through which raw materials, luxury goods, and looted treasures from the colonies would flow into the heart of the empire.

By interweaving these narratives, the work spotlights the construction of national identity and the co-opting of landscapes and waterways into the project of nation-building. Crucially, it also underscores the fluid nature of this process, emphasising that it is never static and always subject to ongoing change. Colonialism not only brought materials but also people, and the work’s conclusion celebrates their presence, imploring us to embrace the newcomers.

Proposal for a Parakeet’s Garden, 2021, displayed outside on the Big Screen Southend, was created in solidarity with migrants and refugees arriving in England. The work envisions a garden for the vibrant green parakeet, a bird that, since its arrival in Britain, has been labelled a feral threat. Faramawy sees the parakeet as “another migrant that made this island their home” and suggests that, instead of viewing them as invasive, they should be embraced. Alongside the outdoor installation, a new print can be viewed in the window gallery.

“A touch in one place can move something at the other end of the earth” asserts the narrator in Birds of Sorrow. Faramawy’s exhibition presents a series of poetically evoked observations that offer a timely, alternative, and celebratory perspective on our place in a world woven together by intricate connections. Through these works, the artist invites us to contemplate the profound impact of our actions. Everything is interconnected, all things change, and the newcomers are welcomed by those that came before.

About Adham Faramawy:

Adham Faramawy is an artist of Egyptian descent based in London. Their work spans media including moving image, sculptural installation, photography, print and painting, engaging with concerns of materiality, touch, the body and toxicity to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalized communities. 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 Chapter, Cardiff (solo); Niru Ratnam Gallery, London (solo), and Cell Projects, London (solo); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Arts, London (group), Somerset House, London (group), Buffalo University Gallery, Buffalo (group); the Bemis Center, Omaha (group). They were shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award 2021 and 2017. Faramawy is the recipient of the Frieze London Artist Award 2023. adhamfaramawy.com