HADI FALLAHPISHEH AT THE POWER STATION

“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment.”

"Allegories," Walter Benjamin famously tells us, "are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.” And, in the work of Hadi Fallahpisheh, allegory emerges in the tension between darkness and fable, where the sweet and apparent innocence of its subject quickly shifts from benign to perverse.

For Fallahpisheh, darkness is a material. “I practically grew up in a darkroom, a mysterious place that stank of chemicals. …a kind of jail.” His practice is multidisciplinary. He works across painting, photography, sculpture, performance and installation to shape narratives that read as fables. Each tell a story. But none square to any singular reading. They speak of things and the impermanence of their respective meanings. Empty and dim, like a vessel’s interior.