Adham Faramawy feature
You get a little shock of the old when you glimpse the lecture theatre at the heart of the Royal Academy Schools in London’s Piccadilly where the young Dubai-born artist Adham Faramawy spends much of his week.
Drawings by venerable artists adorn the walls and a life-size model of a horse so old and fragile it cannot be moved dominates the room.
It is hard to imagine how Faramaway fits in here. He is an artist who fizzes with imaginative ways of using new media – a creator at the cutting edge whose provocative collaborations have been part of London’s avant-garde scene for some time.
But he is among an elite of just 17 postgraduate students culled from some thousand who applied to study here.
The young Arab artist who grew up in Dubai, Sharjah and London, is now poster boy for a show of work by these students. A still from his digital piece “Between Two Suns” is being used to publicise this show: ”Premiums Interim Projects”.
Faramawy works in digital media, photography and performance. “When I was at school I did painting and drawing and I wouldn’t rule that out again at some point,” he says. “But by the time I was doing my A-levels I was already experimenting with video and with performance.”
His background seemed to have destined him for the creative life. His mother is a magazine writer based in Dubai’s Media City and his father is a political cartoonist in Cairo. Faramawy did all of his art studies in the UK – at Norwich in East Anglia and then the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London.
In April his work will again feature in the Academy Schools in a show organised by the Red Mansion Foundation that promotes artistic exchange between Britain and China. It will draw upon a month he spent in a suburb of Beijing. ”It was fascinating discovering how people navigate the realities of living in this city and issues such as the Internet and people’s relationship with authority.”
Faramawy won’t reveal his age “It is irrelevant. I don’t discuss it” (though Wikipedia says he was born in 1981.) And nor will he explain what his art is about. “I don’t mean to evasive, but really if I could explain what it is about I wouldn’t need to make it.” But he says one theme running through recent work is the issue of consensus – how people agree that something is the case.
That is certainly one level of meaning explored in the video work “Between Two Suns” - a science fiction based piece inspired by such UFO cults as the suicidal Heaven’s Gate group in California.
But his life experience and background does flow into the work. He had a period exploring Egyptian history and mythology and he is a Muslim. He says he has the full range of emotional responses to the turbulence in various parts of the region at present. But none of this is dealt with in any specific way in his art.
“It would have been wrong for me to go to Tahrir Square. I have Egyptian roots, but I live here now. I am a Londoner.” His fame is already growing in wider avant-garde circles with shows in Vienna, Berlin, Istanbul, New York and Ireland under his belt. But so far nothing in the Emirates or Egypt.
“I would love that to happen but I have no-one I work with there …-no one who knows me yet. “
“Premiums Interim Projects” runs at the Royal Academy Schools in London from March 2nd to March 15th 2012
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