Preview | 11 September, 6 - 8 pm
In their forthcoming solo exhibition titled ‘The earth laughs in flowers’ Adham Faramawy presents two recent film works, Birds of Sorrow and Daughters of the River alongside a new series of paintings and a sculptural work. The exhibition segues between the personal and the poetic and wider themes of identity, migration and belonging. Faramawy’s family history is interwoven with mythological references, metaphor and historical references, locating the subjective as always enmeshed within the world, histories and stories around us.
As the viewer enters the gallery space the film installation Birds of Sorrow opens the exhibition. Commissioned by Create London, and first seen at Faramawy’s solo institutional show at Focal Point Gallery Birds of Sorrow is set along the waterways of the East London borough of Barking & Dagenham. Once a thriving centre of industry around the River Thames, the area suffered from economic decline but in recent years a younger, more ethnically diverse influx has contributed to urban regeneration. Using the metaphor of migratory birds to think through themes such as exile and return, the work interweaves voice, movement, and landscape to invoke ideas of displacement and resilience.
The film weaves together ecology, mythology, history, and personal memory drawing on mythological and historical references, including the transformation of the Children of Lir and the Great Smog of 1950s London. The use of the mythological can also be seen in the suite of new paintings that are installed around the gallery, that along with the sculptural work form a dialogue with the two moving image works. There are paintings of birds, of plants and of figures becoming landscapes or melding with the land. The Laughing Dove, widely found across the Middle East and native to Egypt - where they are temple birds - is portrayed, as well as other wild rock pigeons. There is a painting of foxglove, which was commonly used to treat heart problems and in folklore had a role in protecting the individual against evil spirits and magic. There is also a portrait of the artist’s mother with anise flowers, associated with protection and blessing. Faramawy’s mother is also the subject of the sculpture towards the front of the gallery that takes its cue from a sculpture the artist’s father did of their mother as a rosebush.
That theme of the subject transforming into the landscape, being enmeshed by its surroundings or the conversely the product of those surroundings, is seen both in further paintings but also the second moving image work, Daughters of the River. The film is a lyrical meditation on kinship and inheritance, where the River Thames alternately acts as a boundary, gathering place, locus of empire and dock for the spoils of empire but also a life-giver. Blending myth with personal narrative, the film questions how histories are passed down, and how they flow through bodies that are both human and non-human.
The work unfolds as a layered, interdisciplinary performance by Faramawy and collaborators, melding dance, sound, and spoken word in order to chart the mythical, historical, and political lives of rivers. Drawing from Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest, the piece navigates the unstable boundary between purity and toxicity, casting imperialist waterways as “sites of ecological collapse”; spaces where colonial power, environmental decay, and romantic nostalgia collide.
The performance moves through green-lit, subterranean spaces, evoking sewers and forgotten channels. Performers wade through contaminated water, pour muddy liquid over themselves, and enact scenes of ritual purification. A documentary-style segment mid-film examines the contemporary politics of the Nile, particularly the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, inviting reflection on resource conflict and historical erasure. The work culminates in an ecstatic, ritualised finale that might be understood as a gathering of memory, grief, and transformation.
‘The earth laughs in flowers’ builds on the artist’s recent institutional exhibitions at Chapter, Cardiff and Focal Point Gallery, Southend, where they investigated how landscapes such as rivers, weeds and waterways can become sites of resistance and belonging. “A touch in one place can move something at the other end of the earth” asserts the narrator in Birds of Sorrow. ‘The earth laughs in flowers’ presents a series of poetically evoked observations that offer a timely, alternative, and ultimately affirmatory - and even celebratory - perspective on our place in a world woven together by intricate connections. Fluid forms resist fixed definitions and queer ecologies challenge inherited hierarchies. Everything is interconnected; all things change
For information on Adham Faramawy's solo show 'The earth laughs in flowers' please contact:
Georgia Griffiths
georgia@niruratnam.com
