Adham Faramawy

Adham Faramawy is an Egyptian artist living and working in London, whose work asks what it means to be ‘native’ or ‘alien’, engaging the notion of queer ecologies in order to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities. Faramawy works across media including moving image, sculptural installation, photography, painting and wall-based works.

Faramawy’s multimedia practice is highly allusive and poetic, moving between history, myth and the present day. Recent works have meditated on the ways rivers, streams and seas, have hidden histories that the artist teases out in order to show that these waterways have been, and are still, politically contested sites. Avoiding the didactic, these works unfold to tell histories of migration, of colonial history and of ecological change.

Works such as ‘And these deceitful waters’ (2023), commissioned by Frieze for the Artist Award Prize 2023, blend history, mythology and a highly poetic sensibility conveyed through the movement of dancers, the narrator’s voice and an evocative score. The work weaves together narratives, suggesting how national identity is constructed and how landscape and get co-opted into the project of nation-building. 

A consideration of fluidity is a constant theme through Faramawy’s work. This is linked to their investigation into the relationship between social and ecological abjection in works 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 who arrive from elsewhere underpins much of Faramawy’s moving image works as well as the paintings that they make. There are a number of recurring motifs in the paintings such as the figure of the pigeon. As a dove painted in profile, the bird has become a celebrated symbol of peace and anti-colonialist sentiment but equally as a common pigeon, the bird is regarded as vermin in contemporary Britain. This dual status, simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, is evoked powerfully and simply; a matter-of-fact way of living for so many living in today’s Britain. Faramawy’s work celebrates the presence of migrants and refugees, who will continue the process of changing how we can imagine the nation.

Selected solo exhibitions include; Chapter, Cardiff (2024), Focal Point Gallery, Southend (2024), Niru Ratnam Gallery, London (2021), and Cell Projects, London (2014) Selected group exhibitions include; Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Arts, London (2023), Somerset House, London (2022), Buffalo University Gallery, Buffalo (2023) and the Bemis Center, Omaha (2023). Faramawy has had screenings at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London; Serpentine Gallery, London and Serpentine Ecologies Symposia, London. They were shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award 2021 and 2017. Faramawy was the recipient of the Frieze London Artist Award 2023. 

Faramawy will have a second solo exhibition at Niru Ratnam, London in Autumn 2025.