A Proposal for a Parakeet’s Garden / Testament

As part of the group exhibition Testament at Goldsmiths CCA, Adham Faramawy exhibited a video work titled ‘A proposal for a parakeet’s garden’, which proposes a garden for the vivid green parakeet, sometimes called a feral threat, as a cipher for anxieties over migration and in solidarity with refugees arriving in England.

Testament was a large-scale group exhibition across the entirety of the CCA building, staged in response to tumultuous period where the UK navigated seismic shifts triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, environmental crises and Brexit, the role of monuments has been brought into sharp focus, becoming the centre of public debate.

Artists were invited to make proposals that consider what is at stake in tearing down and erecting monuments, and what it might mean to rethink the idea of the monument. Are they defunct, illusory statements of permanence, continuity, and manifestations of power? Whose narratives do they preserve, and whose do they suppress? Can they still play a vital role in mediating communal grief and providing a locus for memory? Is there space for them to be re-envisioned?