Adham Faramawy, who uses the pronouns they/them, was born to Egyptian parents in Dubai, UAE in 1981. Faramawy moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, graduating in 2004, before obtaining a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools in 2013 and launching a high-profile career, including a solo display at Tate Britain in 2019. Avoiding simple categorisation, Faramawy’s practice fluidly transitions between installation, video, and technology-driven art, seeking to capture the essence of city life, particularly focusing on how technology influences individuals and their bodies.
Artist Adham Faramawy was born to Egyptian parents in Dubai, UAE in 1981. Faramawy, who uses the pronouns they/them, and to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, graduating in 2004, before obtaining a Postgraduate Diploma from the Royal Academy Schools in 2013.
Faramawy is an artist who creates using a wide range of media and new technologies, including video, painting, digital collage, computer programmes, apps, and print. They refer to their creative approach as an ‘entanglement’, (Faramawy quoted in Neave, 2020), indicating how mind, body, society, and the natural environment are interrelated. Avoiding simple categorisation, Faramawy’s practice fluidly transitions between installation, video, and technology-driven art, showcasing a propensity for blurring lines. This boundary-pushing attitude applies not only to the media they employ, but also to the subject matter they choose to depict. Hence, their work is a testament to an integrated, interdisciplinary approach that refuses to be boxed into traditional categories. Their art seeks to capture the essence of city life, particularly focusing on how technology influences us and our bodies. They show us how living in large, bustling cities, surrounded by towering architecture, constantly bombarded with adverts, and amid teeming crowds, shapes our behaviour and our sense of self. Faramawy uses distortions of commercial symbols and traditional art forms to spotlight how an artwork is itself created and displayed, experimenting with combining different elements, akin to making a collage, or tweaking their arrangement to build meaning.
Faramawy's short, four-minute film, titled Proposal for a Parakeet’s Garden (2022), was made for the exhibition Testament held at Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London. This film explores the lives of migrant communities via metaphorical representations, the central theme revolving around the evolution and proliferation of parakeets within the UK. These brilliant green birds, with their vibrant, exotic, and colourful plumage, are categorised as a feral and invasive species. Easily spotted across London parks, the parakeet is Faramawy’s symbolic representation for migrants and refugees. This symbolism is particularly poignant when considering the increasing number of people of colour who have immigrated to the UK over the past half-century. Proposal for a Parakeet’s Garden reframes the narrative: rather than being considered ‘invasive’, the artist proposes to celebrate the birds in a monument-garden for the displaced. A similar topic is addressed in an earlier work, The Air is Subtle, Various and Sweet (2021) which poses questions about existence and stability. The work may be understood as a meditation from the viewpoint of a person of colour living in the UK at a time where the country was under lockdown. Faramawy considers the idea of what it means to be ‘nativised’ and how the death of their father brought another way of considering cultural belonging. The work explores the cross-generational relationship through ideas about land, plant taxonomy, and concepts of roots and heritage. Faramawy also address issues of materiality, touch, and (toxic) embodiment to question the concept of the 'natural' in relation to marginalised communities. In earlier works, technology and its relationship to the body played a key role, as did the ways in which we navigate technologies to create identifications and participate in the ongoing processes of identity-making. These works also utilise the visual language of advertising to explore the creation of desire. Faramawy has said: ‘My work is about bodies, but it’s also about who’s looking. We still take the male gaze for granted. What happens if we posit a queer subject position? Queerness isn’t one thing, or one type of person. For me this means making work that can accommodate a lot of perspectives’ (Faramawy quoted in Abraham, 2018).
In 2013 Faramawy's print Feel Good (2013), was awarded the Keeper's Print Prize at the RA Schools; it was then produced in a limited edition as part of a suite of four small-scale works by RA Schools graduates to celebrate the opening of the Keeper’s House at the Royal Academy in 2013 and to raise funds for RA Schools' students. Faramawy was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2017 and, in 2019, the artist presented Skin Flicks at a screening dedicated to their work at Tate Britain. Faramawy was a 2018-19 fellow at Broadway’s Near Now, Nottingham, and has had solo exhibitions at Cell Projects, London (2014), Bluecoat, Liverpool (2017) and Niru Ratnam, London (2021). Faramawy has exhibited in group shows at Somerset House, London (2020) and the Science Gallery, King's College London (2020), among others. He has participated in Art Night, which took place in locations across the UK through June 2021 and has presented a performance Queer Earth Liquid Matters as part of symposium held at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2022). Adham Faramawy currently lives and works in East London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Adham Faramawy]
Publications related to [Adham Faramawy] in the Ben Uri Library