It often happens that when we think of art we think of it as discrete objects: paintings on canvas or board, drawings or watercolours on paper, sculptures, found and hand-crafted objects on shelves, in frames, in cases and in cabinets all represent the quintessence of cultural artefacts that we treasure and preserve.
Sometimes I think the materiality of art is a spell cast by the market and sometimes I think it is more deeply rooted in our need to anchor ourselves against entropy. Either way, it’s all the more refreshing when you encounter an artist who deals less in objects than in concepts, and even better when you find one who deals less in concepts than in moments.
Adam Farah-Saad, whose work was the subject of a solo presentation by Public gallery at last year’s Frieze, makes beguiling art from objects where the significance is more emotional than aesthetic, which are arranged and subtly finessed to form a cosmos of memory. Objects, for Farah-Saad, open the door to remembrance, which helps him to make sense of his life.
On the surface, it looks like flashy contemporary art – and it is, in the best possible way – but, more than that, its meaning is multilayered and subtle: it means something to Farah-Saad that most people wouldn’t get, something which queer people see like the moon on a clear night. For example, he frames photographs in expansive pine panelling that gay men will instantly associate with saunas like Chariots, but which the rest of you will see as the pinnacle of 1970s interior design. In that sense, it’s a commentary on how queer people live secret lives.
Farah-Saad’s work explores the unconcealed underside of society in which queer people live in plain sight and yet hidden from view. His currency is the precise moment of encounter, the moment when something does or doesn’t happen, and the specificity of the place in which it occurs. At Bold Tendencies in Peckham, Farah-Saad has created a monument to his friend, Paul-Joseph, who died in 2023.
The centrepiece of One Sweet Day (2024) is a fountain from Battersea Park, one of Farah-Saad’s favourite cruising grounds, where the pair, first as a couple and then as friends, which, Farah-Saad says, is the classic narrative of queer friendship, spent so much time. The piece is a monument on a personal level, but at a purely artistic level it is an aesthetic marvel, which satisfies everything we really want art to be.
The work, a life-size rendering of Farah-Saad’s reality, exposed to the elements, as real and as raw as the emotions that underpin it, captures the sense Farah-Saad’s work is therapeutic: Bold Tendencies had invited him to do a piece and then Paul-Joseph died so he didn’t think much about it until the day before the funeral when he sent a sketch. From that moment on, his shrine to his departed friend didn’t change – what you see in Peckham is the first and only thought Farah-Saad had and as such it captures perfectly the way that death arrests not just life but captures as if in amber the moment of love and grief.
In capturing the moment, Farah-Saad reflects on the experiences that have shaped him. His art is an excavation of the sites where moments have been and gone – Wood Green Shopping Centre. Brent Cross, Battersea Park, saunas, benches and bushes – uncovering the fragile layers of his being. He says, reflecting on the passing of time, ‘As you get older, things don’t change as you expect’. It’s funny because it takes a mountain of courage to admit that life takes us by surprise, which is really what happens to all of us, but art helps us to make sense of it.
