ADHAM FARAMAWY | THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
Curated by RUN
Friday 26th April 2008, 6 – 8pm
PERFORMANCES BY: THEO ADAMS, MILLIE BROWN, FANCY CHANCE, HUGH CHAPMAN, ADAM JAMES, AMY MCDONOUGH, EDDIE PEAKE, RUSSELLA, AND LUKE SELLERS.
RUN is pleased to present ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, a performance event meditating on alienation and change by Adham Faramawy. For the installation at RUN, Faramawy has created a theatrical backdrop from his trademark sculptural work, a geometric structure of stacked televisions utilising the qualities of display inherent in television sets as a metaphor for the performative act. The sculpture will, for this event, be used to present a series of performances by time based artists, ranging from the Performance Art tradition, through to Drag and Burlesque.
The performers have been curated by Adham to illustrate concepts surrounding fluid identity offered as a solution to the problem of the ‘other’. The act of wearing and shedding personae, meme theory, and the ‘fluidity’ this engenders proposes a discussion on the use of these as social tools in the construction of a cohesive community. The fragmentation of the self into a multiplicity of identities is a strategy for integrating new milieus. The donning of fluid identity rejects only the concept of the ‘other’, replacing it with radical acceptance; to defeat the concept of ‘otherness’, one must become the other.
The video work screened on the multiple televisual displays plays one highly edited visual stimulus at different points on each monitor. This draws attention to the relationship between each part of the structure as a whole, a play on the role of the pixel. It introduces the concept of a network, a community or at least a communication. With digital signals relaying points of relative meaning, multiplicity and polysemy are introduced and related to the successful construction of networks. Identity relationships within a digital network may include multiple identity entities. However, in a decentralized network like the Internet, such extended identity relationships effectively require the existence of independent trust relationships and also a means of integrating these relationships into larger relation units. The set constructed as a platform for the performers discusses this concept, whereas the variety act discards it in favour of individual performances whose modes of display hark back to the beginnings of modernist identification of the individual and alienation in relation to the city, itself a condensed, hyper-network, preceding tele-communications.
Adham Faramawy graduated from The Slade School of Art in 2004 and has performed and exhibited internationally both as a solo artist and as part of the !WOWOW! group. Most notably he has been included in events and exhibitions at Tate Britain, Anna Kustera Gallery, New York and URA! Gallery, which was part of the Istanbul Biennale.
