Hadi Falapishi

SEARCHERS

Act III

The Breakers, Newport RI
August 30, 2024

Images courtesy of Tom Powel Imaging

curator Dodie Kazanjian

A Dada dinner opening the third act of Hadi Falapishi’s SEARCHERS in the loggia of the Breakers mansion.

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.