Adham Faramawy

As an artist, I work across moving image, sculptural installation, photography, print, and painting. My practice explores materiality, touch, the body, and toxicity, questioning notions of the natural in relation to marginalized communities. My performance-for-camera works blend dance, music, and spoken word to examine my identity as a first-generation Egyptian immigrant in Newham, East London. These pieces explore my connection to local landscapes and wildlife. Local experiences inform my work, from migration stories to environmental concerns; personal fragments interweave with myth and poetry. My videos trace our interconnectedness and complicity in environmental degradation, and ask: how can we move forward?

HOW DOES YOUR SUBMITTED WORK RESPOND TO THE CIRCA 20:25 MANIFESTO?
For the CIRCA Prize, I’m presenting A Proposal for a Parakeet’s Garden, a video made in response to the so-called migration crisis and in support of refugees seeking asylum in the UK.  Since making this video challenges have intensified, from the Bibby Stockholm controversy and 2024’s fascist riots to proscription of those standing up for Palestine.  This work asks, if we welcome and support the other, what’s at stake?  The parakeet, a migrant brought to England along colonial trade-routes as a Victorian pet, breaks free and thrives, often called a feral threat, it becomes a metaphor calling for kindness.

IF AWARDED THE £30,000 CIRCA PRIZE, WHAT 10-MINUTE WORK WOULD YOU CREATE – AND HOW WOULD IT EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF REFUGIA?
If selected I would like to make a video work that explores the intersection of environment and migration while materially supporting and paying refugees and asylum-seekers in London. Collaborating with charities offering refugees the space to build community through agricultural work and bee keeping on small farms in London and Kent, the video I make would use storytelling, dance, and participation, to explore the instrumental role of bees in pollination and agriculture, and the decline in bee populations due to pesticide use and habitat destruction, tracing our interdependence and the role bees are playing in healing people that need it.

FOLLOW ADHAM FARAMAWY ON INSTAGRAM

Funding for the CIRCA PRIZE is generated entirely by the #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model that reinvests proceeds from affordable art sold on CIRCA.ART into new public art commissions, charitable causes, art education and prizes. Since launching in 2020, the initiative has raised over £1 Million, placing artists and communities at the centre of an economy that continually reinvests in the future of art and culture.

The CIRCA PRIZE 2025 winners will be revealed LIVE in Piccadilly Circus on Monday 13 October, with a special 30-minute award ceremony starting at 20:00 BST. Don’t miss it!