Adham Faramawy

Adham Faramawy makes paintings, prints, sculptural works and digitally manipulated videos incorporating performance for camera. Through the distortion of varying commercial forms, his installations highlight the conditions of the work’s production and display, where narrative is regarded as incidental and moving image is treated as a sculptural surface. His exploration of orthodox technologies is playfully orchestrated and questions the immaterial via his employment of banal resources, which include television monitors, desktop screen savers and home computer programs. Faramawy humorously undermines the stability of the digitalized image, resulting in vivid, hallucinatory works, which investigate the construction of narrative.

Faramawy’s multi-disciplinary approach reveals attempts at producing works, which refer formally to each other, creating a tessellating time based dialogue. Repetitions of visual motifs are used to lead the viewer through installations that present and then continually translate themselves.

At Open Heart Surgery, amalgamated sculptural plinths will interact with videos shown on flat screen monitors, set against textured paintings and seductive colour ramp prints. Paint and pixel oscillate in his wall-based works, whose surfaces counterpoise colour schemes that reproduce screen saver gradients. Viewed together, the works pitch the viewer into interplays between liquid planes and tactile surfaces. Faramawy’s interfaces explore the presence of computer-generated material within a contemporary urban context increasingly mediated by screens. The artist’s experiences within this context are fed through a formal synthesis that produces fractured and subjective narratives.

Adham Faramawy is a Dubai-born, London-based artist of Egyptian origin. He completed his BA in Fine Art at the Slade and graduated this year from the royal Academy Schools Postgraduate Fine Art programme. Solo exhibitions include ‘Total Flex 2.0’, Legion.tv (2012); and ‘4’, URA Gallery, Istanbul (2009). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’, Spike Island, Bristol and ICA, London (2013); ‘Chimera Q.T.E’, Cell Project Space, London (2013); ‘Heterotopias’, New End Art Foundation, New York (2013); ‘Abstract Cabinet’, David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2013); ‘Febreze’, Kinman Gallery, London (2013); ‘Ruby’, Gallery Vela, London (2012); and ‘Interplanetary Revolution’, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2012).

In 2013 Faramawy has been short listed for the Dazed/Converse Award (announced October 2013). His work has also been screened at the Oberhausen Film Festival, the Ikono on Air Festival, and the Edinburgh Arts Festival (presented by Circa Projects). In 2012 the artist was commissioned by FACT to contribute to the rhizome- hosted ‘Five Videos’ online series in response to Liverpool Biennial: the Unexpected Guest. In 2011 he collaborated with LuckyPDF TV for Frieze Projects, and participated in ‘BYOB’ at the Venice Biennale’s second (unofficial) Internet Pavilion. He was a recipient of the Red Mansion Residency in Beijing, China in the same year.