Working throughout portray, images, ceramics, sculpture, efficiency and set up, Fallahpisheh weaves a story that’s part-allegory, part-fable. A recurring forged of a human, a mouse, a cat and a canine kind a quasi-family unit that at occasions feels nostalgic and home, however usually veers towards entrapment and violence, prompting questions round belonging, battle and nervousness. Going down throughout all 4 of the CCA’s higher galleries, the exhibition centres on concepts round freedom—its symbolisms, protections and contingencies. Life-size cages interrupt the exhibition expertise, separating art work from viewer. The exhibition’s title references the German idea of Vogelfrei, actually that means “as free as a chook,” however which has been corrupted over time to imply “rightless, with out safety, outlawed,” as outlined by Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben. By means of actually caging each the viewer and his artworks, Fallahpisheh means that freedom is at all times a contradictory place that depends on the captive or unprotected standing of others.

Fallahpisheh additionally presents the darkroom as jail, referencing the lengthy intervals of blacked-out isolation that his photographic work require. Drawing throughout photosensitive paper with color gels and a torch, the artist leaves a considerable amount of his work to likelihood and improvisation, not understanding what colors may emerge till the tip. Images with no digital camera turns into a efficiency, emphasising the entire reliance on mild in darkness to provide photographs. On this manner, Fallahpisheh’s course of references how previous traumas are dropped at mild by way of remedy and publicity. His anthropomorphic characters—who usually seem trapped in homes—current a type of post-Disney household, their intentionally naïve model reflecting a childlike reliance on energy constructions and hierarchies. Transgressive and irrational, these figures increase questions across the framework of the household, and its in-built notions of concord and containment. Fallahpisheh performs with the innate energy of sure objects to induce reminiscences of childhood. Quite a lot of vintage quilts from the Nineteen Twenties function backdrops or frames to the photographic work. They carry heat and a way of domesticity to the works, conjuring the sense of a physique but in addition quaint inside décor and household heirlooms. The exhibition may also characteristic ceramic works that veer between human-like kinds and precariously stacked totems. The ceramics’ exhausting fragility sharply contrasts with their pliable look, with pots bent, balanced, wedged between one another and filled with delicate toys. Stuffed animals—usually in varied states of misery—and trend equipment function nods to popular culture and the intimacy of nostalgia, and question how nostalgia can warp the boundaries between reminiscence and creativeness.

at Goldsmiths CCA, London
till September 18, 2022

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