Our proposal for Paris Internationale is a solo booth by Adham Faramawy. It will centre on the presentation of a single-screen video work, ‘The air is subtle, various and sweet’ (2020). The work might be described as part of an emerging genre termed Queer Ecologies that has come to stand as a powerful corrective that equate “natural” with straight whilst “queer” is held to be against nature. Queer Ecologies aim to shift paradigms away from the binary, rigid and heteronormative towards interdependency and fluidity. ‘The air is subtle, various and sweet’ is set over three chapters. The first explores Faramawy’s relationship to the natural environment and plants that grow in Wanstead Flats, an area of marshland in London near where the artist lives. Faramawy poses questions around why certain plants are described as ‘native’ and others ‘invasive’, drawing parallels with the migrant condition. The second chapter shifts to Toukh, a town in Egypt and explores Faramawy’s relationship with their late father, who was also an artist. The final chapter returns to the Wanstead Flats and is an affirmative statement of belonging in the here and now. This work was first presented as part of Serpentine Galleries ‘The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory’ festival in December 2020. It was then displayed in installation form at Faramawy’s debut solo exhibition at Niru Ratnam in September 2021. The film was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2021 and has subsequently been screened at Tate Modern, London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The film work will be presented alongside new paintings produced by Faramawy which also might be approached through the conceptual framework of Queer Ecologies. These are paintings that reject ideas of human exceptionalism and insist that nature exists in a continuous, holistic sense where all things are connected and interrelated.
