Hadi Falapishi

SEARCHERS

In Three Acts

Great Friends Meeting House & Rough Point, Newport, RI
Summer 2024

Images courtesy of Tom Powel Imaging

curator Dodie Kazanjian

For SEARCHERS, the artist Hadi Falapishi imagines encounters with the unknown. He pulls together the ambivalence of being excited and scared of arriving in a new place. At the same time, through an inversion of the notion of migration, he shifts the focus to the crowd receiving the new arrival, exploring themes of acceptance and curiosity, and animating the act of looking, searching, and revealing the unknown. In all the works displayed in three locations around Newport, he exaggerates that sense of misplacement that is tied to any act of migration.

Falapishi, who was born in Tehran in 1987 and emigrated to New York ten years ago, has made 100 paintings, sculptures, and other fanciful objects that coexist with and comment on the one-hundred elephant herd that has landed in Newport.

“My show imagines a place when new creatures arrive and projects how the locals respond to that news.” - Hadi Falapishi

The Solarium
Rough Point
680 Bellevue Avenue, Newport, RI
2 July - 25 August 2024
Tuesday - Sunday, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm

Great Friends Meeting House
21 Farewell Street, Newport, RI
5 July - 25 August 2024
Friday - Sunday, 12:00 pm - 4:00 pm

The Great Hall
The Breakers
44 Ochre Point Avenue, Newport, RI
31 August - 6 September 2024
open daily, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm