You can now watch 'The air is subtle, various and sweet' (2020) online via Serpentine Galleries.

'Skin Flick' (2019) screenings ended on 22/01/2021.

Premiered as part of Serpentine Galleries’ art & ecology festival and made during the COVID-19 pandemic, ‘The air is subtle, various and sweet’ has been a way for Faramawy to think about the artist’s relationship with their father who passed away this summer. The film explores their relationships with ideas of the land, plant taxonomy (whether a body is understood as native, whether this means it’s desirable), ideas of roots/heritage, in both Faramawy’s home in Newham east London and his father’s in Toukh, a town north of Cairo in Egypt.

The air is subtle, various and sweet (2020) by Adham Faramawy

Translation and Research Support: Basma Faramawy

Performance: Tyler Deyn and Joseph Funnell

Production Assistance: Alyah Nurya Bint Ahmed Hatta

Sound Mastering: Steve Wyatt

Premiered by Serpentine Galleries at The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory, a two day art & ecology festival on soil, earth, land and ground, 5-6 December, 2020.

Adham Faramawy talks about Skin Flick in terms of entanglement and toxicity, thinking about the substances we use and ingest, and the species we interact with and live alongside, as a way to denaturalise desire.

“Premiered at Tate Britain last September, Faramawy’s Skin Flick, 2019, is perhaps the most ambitious and personally revealing of the artist’s strange films, a signature fusion of comedic trans-humanist product placement, Cronenbergian body-reconfiguration and heartfelt testimony.

The film shows a writhing cohort of male models anointing themselves with mysterious gelatinous ointments as the artist, in the guise of a fantastical horned entity, relays the story of their own attempts to counteract discomfort with their own body… These images are permeated by animated effects that either smear the artist’s likeness into new tumescent configurations or contaminate it with sprouting mycelia and creeping moulds. As Faramawy describes the effects of their experiments, the distinction between animated effect and bodily register is blurred…”

— Excerpt from ‘On Animatics’ by Jamie Sutcliffe, first published by Art Monthly, May 2020

Skin Flick (2019) by Adham Faramawy

Performers in order of appearance: Alvin Tran, Andreas Stylianou, Nico Epstein, Peter Babbage, Joseph Funnell, Luke Hornsby, Hannah HrH Hopkins, Gray Wielebinski

Camera: Jack O'Brien, Nick Harris

Sound Recording: Nick Harris

Soundtrack: junior XL

VFX: Tom Kemp

Adham Faramawy is an artist based in London. Their work spans media including moving image, sculptural installation and print, engaging and using technology to discuss issues of materiality, touch, the mediation of images and (toxic) embodiment to question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalised communities.

adhamfaramawy.com