A contemporary art exhibition in conversation with The Great Elephant Migration. By Hadi Falapishi.
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.
From the artist:
“My show imagines a place when new creatures arrive and projects how the locals respond to that news.”
-Hadi Falapishi
Searchers is an installation in three acts; one act was on view in the Solarium of Rough Point. The Great Friends Meeting House and the Great Hall of The Breakers featured the other two acts.
