Adam Farah-Saad

Interview by Hannah Black

Adam Farah-Saad speaks a quasi-mystical object language of desire. His works express the impossibility of forgetting, and therefore the bankruptcy of what goes by the name of memory.

His sculptures, collages, and installations are profoundly emotional and possessed of a playful, knowing sophistication. His materials—dated home electronics, soda, petty bourgeois ornament—express in such earnest and heartfelt terms a very personal relation to the detritus of a 1990s childhood that I almost begin to believe in a horseshoe theory of irony. But if a trace of ironic nostalgia seems to cling to the work, it’s the impersonal irony of history—specifically, twenty-first century remodulations of class war into gentrification and other forms of retrenchment.

London, where Farah-Saad was born and still lives, suffers wounds inflicted by the weapon of real estate, and he elects to suffer with it. Hyper-aware of its degradations, he treats the city as the secret garden of childhood, and of childhood’s later, adult embellishment—sex. The register of the personal—sex, grief, friendship, all that animates the work—is kept in eerie tension with the violence both internal to it and inflicted upon it.

Farah-Saad’s work conveys a Proustian sensibility for how objects prove that the past doesn’t pass away, although shadowed by the dumb literalness of death. Only a melancholic (as in, someone who refuses to forget) could produce a body of work so replete with mordant grief and yet so much fun to look at.

My mum died too early to teach me about love and relationships, so I’m trying to learn something from the music I remember her listening to when I saw her crying - or at least connect to her spirit so we can share our heartache, 2021

Billboard print, Lift Systems 5-Disc CD Tower, CD Albums: Mariah Carey, Butterfly (Colombia Records, 1997) Whitney Houston, My Love is Your Love (Arista Records LLC, 1998) Janet Jackson, The Velvet Rope (Black Doll Inc. and Virgin Records America, 1997) Madonna, Ray of Light (Warner Records Inc. 1998) Sugababes, One Touch (London Music Stream Ltd., 2000)

Hannah Black (HB): How does work happen for you? I imagine you walking around London.

Adam Farah-Saad (AFS): Yeah. I walk around, and things happen at the studio that end up being in the work. I really turned the studio into my second home. I've done so many things here: I've taken mushrooms here; I've had sex here; I've cried a lot here; other people have cried a lot here; and I've had the most explosive arguments.

HB: People often receive your work in terms of mourning. There are references to mourning processes, as well as obsolete objects. But I feel like your work is much more temporally disturbed than a term like mourning suggests. Although maybe there's a temporal disturbance in mourning.

AFS: A big part of my practice—you could call it an extension of the studio—is that I always go to markets and car boot sales around London. I became obsessed with them, because they feel like portals in a way, and they challenge the notion of obsolescence versus advancement. When I go to Vauxhall Market, for instance, it’s this whole community of people who are saying, “These objects are valuable for us, and they can still be valuable for you as well.” It made sense to me, because I'm still working through some of the moments in my life that these objects are attached to, and so they don’t really feel nostalgic to me. As an artist, I feel like I have to be an investigator of my own life on all levels.

When I was in secondary school, I had a pretty rigorous practice of pirating and downloading albums, and burning them onto CDs. I would find the original album artwork online and print it out to slip into the case. I recently made these works that were a whole bunch of CD cases stuck on shelves, forming an image. The CD made sense materially to carry a language.

“As an artist, I feel like I have to be an investigator of my own life on all levels.”

HB: The CD is super evocative. It's a mirror with a hole in the middle. There's a lot going on there that I think relates back to the wider concerns of your practice.

AFS: I think I have a weird relationship to desire in my practice, and maybe it relates to those things, but I'm not quite sure how to express that. Aesthetically, the CD is very alluring. I see loads of things as portals, as well—I always have—and the CD represents that way into another world.

The face of you, my substitute for love, 2024

C-Type print, jewel CD cases, white powder coated steel CD shelves

HB: There are lost objects, or maybe not lost but salvaged objects, and there are also lost people.

AFS: I started making art because my mum died when I was young, and I had nobody to talk or work through that process with. The act of creation was what helped me understand what was going on. In certain ways, my practice has never changed from that original intention. Sometimes that makes me feel insecure, or a bit naïve, but that's what I do. My practice is a practice in mourning; it's almost like a prayer or casting a spell.

HB: What is the spell trying to do?

AFS: It's trying to uplift me, and pump me up, and make me feel held. At times in my life where I've felt so lonely, the only thing there for me was art.

HB: So, you're making a kind of mother structure.

AFS: I think there have been cases where that has been quite explicit, like in my show at Camden Art Centre. Maybe that relates to the fact that I make these portals.

HB: I guess a portal can be something you get birthed from, so that makes sense. What was your mom's relationship to art?

AFS: She wasn't an artist. She didn't really have a profession. She was disabled for most of her life. She was just concerned with trying to live as comfortably as possible, but in the process of that, towards the end of her life, she used to go to this day center where they did art classes, which I remember going to with her sometimes. She started to make some very beautiful paintings and drawings, which I only have a memory of, and I sometimes dream about, because they were all destroyed after she died.

HB: Why were they destroyed?

AFS: Her family didn't value them. I'm not really sure. I never got answers. But sometimes I have dreams of being in the home where she lived and finding these portfolios with loads of her art in it.

HB: Wow. Have you ever tried to recreate them?

AFS: I've thought about it, but I haven't, because I have a very fraught relationship with the idea of painting in general. So, that's probably why I've never gone through with that.

HB: I would love to see your paintings, because your work is overflowing with this super fluent, audacious, juxtapositional sensibility, but I get it. Does this intuitive capacity for combination and recombination rely on almost like an athlete's zone state of not consciously knowing what the object means?

In This First Year of My 30s I’ve Had More Sex Than I Did in My Entire 20s (THAT ASS IS MINE DON’T FORGET IT), 2023

C-Type print, knotty pine panel, wood varnish, museum glass

AFS: I’m inspired by the aesthetic choices of my parents, who didn’t think of themselves as artists. I love it when there's a crossover between a material from my childhood and my adulthood in different contexts. In 2022, I made a piece titled In This First Year of My 30s I've Had More Sex Than in My Entire 20s. I was thinking about my dad and his interior design decisions based on his class aspirations. In our first council flat, he made his own office in the living room, which he cladded with these knotty pine panels. As a child, I felt the weird erotics of that office space. Later, as an adult, when I started going to gay clubs, the darkrooms also had this same material. My relationship to sex is really enmeshed with my childhood—there's a complete throughline. So, the pine I use in the work made sense. The actual photo is from when I hooked up with this guy in my studio, and he was really aggressive and just tore open my boxers. I loved it. At the end, I saw the boxers were on the floor with a massive hole in them, and I put my hand through the hole. I said, “I should make an image of this.” I did it on a flatbed scanner, so my hand is really touching the light source. I thought there was something interesting about that.

“My relationship to sex is really enmeshed with my childhood—there's a complete throughline.”

HB: That work is paired with another piece where there's a photograph of a chest with an “AMOR” tattoo. It's like, you’re reaching for love, through the hole.

AFS: That was his chest. For weeks afterwards, I was fantasizing about us having a relationship. That's the thing—there are all these stories that are underlying the creation of an artwork, and I know it might be cliché, but, for me, it really is about those things. I look at the artworks as byproducts of those experiences.

HB: Everyone’s desire is related to their childhood. But do you feel like the way your desire is connected to your childhood is especially intense or excessive?

AFS: Yeah. I feel like it's in quite an excessive way. I feel that someone should be able to see that in the artwork. There is such a mix of things in my practice. It can be about mourning and sex and fun and heartbreak, all at the same time. That’s how I've always experienced life.

“There is such a mix of things in my practice. It can be about mourning and sex and fun and heartbreak, all at the same time. That’s how I've always experienced life.”

HB: There’s an ongoing-ness about your materials—they don't seem to be presented as objects of nostalgia. Maybe that’s related to the stuckness of trauma and how it anchors you to a particular moment or era of your life. But, at the same time, for artists, childhood can be a rich resource. It's such a deep inner resource to have this really intense and ongoing relationship to your child self. A lot of people don't have that.

I wanted to ask you about your use of fountains in your work.

NETWORK & CONTACT (N22 DISCREET MIX), 2023

Steel 6-person wash fountain, KA grape soda, water pump

AFS: I've made three different fountain artworks. They all come from completely different places and were made for completely different reasons.

The one in NETWORK & CONTACT (N22 DISCREET MIX) from 2023 was a total replica of a washbasin fountain from the men's toilets in Wood Green Shopping Centre, where I would go as a child with my dad, and that I would experience later as an adult as a cruising spot. I became quite obsessed with that architecture and what it allowed to happen in that space. You would often find yourself washing your hands with someone facing you on the opposite side. That allowed this moment of contact.

I like Samuel R. Delany’s notion of contact in the book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. He talks about how pre-gentrification architecture allowed for what he called inter-class contact. This is something I resonated with, having grown up in London and seen that contact be eroded in many ways. Even in gay venues, there’s a changing landscape around class, and sometimes my practice focuses on that.

HB: While I was preparing for this interview, I ended up watching a talk by Jack Halberstam on Alvin Baltrop’s photos of cruising spaces in New York in the 1970s. Halberstam used the term “destitution” and I was really struck by that word in relation to your work. I know you’re interested in psychogeography. The processes that you’re describing really concentrate not just on the factual history of real estate development, but also this wider feeling of destitution in all senses. My impression of cruising is of a simultaneously alienated and very proximate sociality. It’s both convergent with this degraded and destitute city and, at the same time, it’s in conflict with it.

AFS: Exactly. I've always focused on this particular moment in my life that allowed me to pursue being an artist, and that was when I came out to my dad a few months after my mom died when I was 17. When I came out as gay, I was often socializing with people who were much older than me, but the dynamic felt balanced. I would go to queer spaces that welcomed me, and I would speak to all these adults, and it was an experience of inter-class contact. I grew up on council estates, which were rife with poverty, and where everyone was working class. Through being in queer spaces, I suddenly got in contact with people who were middle class yuppies and, truth be told, they were the ones who encouraged me to go and study art.

HB: There was a reparenting that happened through sex.

I was interested in the fountains because they evoke origin. They’re also devotional.

AFS: I wasn't thinking about that when I made them. But recently I have been thinking about water as a healing material. I'm super depressed at the moment and I've been taking really long baths every single night. I’ve been thinking about the sound of water. I can't go to sleep at night without putting on rain sounds. I was thinking about the architecture of memorial sites, of which there are plenty in London. In the case of One Sweet Day (2024), the fountain is a replica of one in Battersea Park, which was a cruising ground for me.

One Sweet Day, 2024

Steel powder coated fountain, steel powder coated pull up bars, koshi wind chimes, brass chains, poppers bottles, digital print on mesh fabric, steel park benches, gravel

HB: The fountain in NETWORK & CONTACT is running with KA grape soda, which I know you've used in many different contexts. It’s not something cleansing that comes out, but something sticky and staining.

AFS: When I was a teenager, we used to get KA grape soda every single day after school. I was always fascinated with the color. I thought it was so beautiful, the really deep, dark purple. I used it in my fountain as an ode to that time. I also liked the reflective quality of it—the image of someone looking down into a lake at nighttime with the moonlight, but because of the color you can do that in the daytime.

The first time I used the grape soda was in a work called PSYCHOCRUISING, from 2018. It was photos from my archive, from around London. I was looking at the grape soda as this affective filter, placing another layer of desire and intention on top of the image. There was also, again, this portal-like situation. When you looked down into it, you really felt like you could just jump in and go into that place.

HB: A reflective surface is a different kind of stickiness. It takes on the surroundings, or the face of the person looking at it.

Something to do with the sacred seems to be in the work: your way of dwelling with materials that have this mysterious personal significance, maybe just the significance of use. Does that feel true? I’m also thinking about shrines.

AFS: That feels completely true, because I often want to literally make shrines to some people. Maybe that's my religious and spiritual practice coming into play with the art. It relates back to mourning.

HB: What is your religious and spiritual practice?

AFS: I have what I would call a disidentifying practice towards all of that stuff. I was born into an Islamic family, and then my dad became atheist, and then he became Christian. Now he's...really I’d refer to him as a theologian and maybe a religious pluralist. All of that has affected me. I would call myself spiritual. I literally call out to God sometimes, and I call out to Jesus, and the universe, and the air. Sometimes I just pray to the air. Even though I can see all the problematics in religion and spirituality—for me, anyway—I went through this phase of being interested in the mystical sides of all of these Abrahamic religions, and being really into Carl Jung as well. When I was working on that Camden Art Centre show, I was engrossed in The Red Book by Jung.

HB: There’s an idea of a mystic or shaman as somewhere in between a person and an animal. This median position. And something about your vibe as an artist and person speaks to that, something in this melancholic relation you seem to have to the world.

PSYCHOCRUISING I - VI, 2018–2022

Digital prints on waterproof fabric, metal dog kennel trays, KA Black Grape soda, poppers

AFS: Yeah. I think that's why I kept bringing up disidentifications (as in José Esteban Muñoz’s 1999 book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics) because it allows me to hold these multiple things at the same time. There are artists whose practices talk about those things very explicitly. I think it functions differently, aesthetically speaking.

HB: Mysticism is associated with a certain aesthetic, but your materials are things like robot dogs and CDs and poppers. But when I was looking at the bottles of poppers and wind chimes hung on chains in One Sweet Day, I was like, “Oh, holes and openings!” The portal ranges from the sexual to this more transformational register, and it's working across that entire range. But I understand the desire to ironize it. The posture towards objects is devotional, but only insofar as that's possible, given how we're living.

AFS: Recently, I feel like I'm starting to express some of the bitterness I feel within all of these experiences. I made all these works that were acts of mourning. I was making them, specifically, for those people. The memorial for my late friend PJ was really just a conversation between me and him, but I made another artwork recently called They Want Us Artists to Die (2025). After PJ died, I started to feel angry—because he died young, he died living in relative poverty and, in my view, he also died being disappointed by the world around him—I would even say failed by the world around him.

I'm in contact with a lot of queer people who are almost in an underworld, people who are being completely forgotten about. I don't see a lot of representation of what's going on with them in art, even in these last few years with the institutional trend to represent queer lives and to aestheticize all of that.

“I'm in contact with a lot of queer people who are almost in an underworld, people who are being completely forgotten about. I don't see a lot of representation of what's going on with them in art, even in these last few years with the institutional trend to represent queer lives and to aestheticize all of that.”

HB: It's very moving hearing you speak about that. In London, the abjection inflicted on poor people is in this really intense relationship to an especially vicious and empty aesthetic of gentrification. You’re right, I don't see that represented, and I don't even know how it can be represented.

AFS: Exactly. It's something I've been thinking about in terms of where my practice goes next and I think They Want Us Artists to Die might be the beginning of a new chapter. For that work I was using these archival boxes—my laptop's sitting on one right now. They were made for business purposes, but I saw them automatically as a prop. I was thinking of those scenes in films where people are fired from their office job and they're told to pack up their desk into this same box. There was something pertinent about that material to me. The artwork is two of these boxes filled with green glass chippings, which are often used on graves in the cemeteries near where I grew up. I put these fuel burners inside of them and lit them. When exhibited, they last until the flame naturally goes out. It was a spell, and it felt like the flames stood for us—one for me, one for PJ. I wanted to represent the closeness that we had, as I considered him a soulmate of mine. But I was using the visual language of the office. There are all these different, colliding references. It’s a very sinister aesthetic language, but at the same time, it's also erotic for me.

I was going to name it something else, but then I saw the news that this famous drag queen, The Vivienne, had died, and she was only 32 years old. It started to make me feel angry. You could argue artists have always been treated shitty, but I feel the contempt and willful misunderstanding towards artists from every aspect of society, and even within what's called the art world. It makes me paranoid, which I think is evident in the title. But, ultimately, the work is a question about where my practice goes next.

They Want Us Artists to Die, 2025 (detail view; full artwork image at top of page)

Archival boxes, green glass chippings, fuel burners

HB: What is that new direction?

AFS: I started to question whether any of my artmaking was enough to express the depths of some of these thoughts. I started to think about the practice of writing, or more explicit storytelling. I feel like the medium that speaks to me and my heartbreak the most is writing, or cinema. I want to write screenplays.

HB: I would love to see your films. I really hope that happens. It was really, really great to talk.

Hannah Black

Hannah Black is an artist and writer. She has contributed to a number of publications including Bookforum, Frieze, 4 Columns and Tank. Her most recent exhibition was “The Directions” at Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in the Netherlands.