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Published online: 27 March 2023
© The Author(s) 2023
The title Young and Clueless, which has served to nominate three of Hadi Falapishi’s (formerly Fallahpisheh) recent art exhibitions in London, Athens, and Dallas evokes notions of childhood and children, and of naïve, limited perspectives that have since been overcome. In contrast, with its various examples of ambiguous mixed media, Young and Clueless masterfully dethrones and decenters the conceits of certain knowledge, revealing that our personal and cultural perspectives are always only perspectives. As psychoanalysis demonstrates, our viewpoints and experiences revolve around how we encounter the lack at the heart of subjectivity and the lack in any socio-symbolic matrix. In other words, whether we are encountering an art exhibition or a lover, fantasy structures our experience. In what follows, I will guide you through the seen and the unseen of the exhibition by commenting on selected pieces; aided by psychoanalytic notions of fantasy, nostalgia, castration, the fetish, empathy, and the uncanny, I will speak to the ways in which someone might experience and interpret the art. It should be noted that Almost Perfect (2023), the most recent exhibition of Falapishi’s as of the time of writing, bears many similarities to the exhibition under discussion but—like the Young and Clueless exhibitions—has undergone modifications based on the city and space in which it is shown.
Falapishi’s Young and Clueless, as it was exhibited in Dallas, Texas at The Power Station in 2022, demonstrates on a number of levels—some literal, as the exhibit was split into a main floor and a mezzanine—the interpretive and experiential possibilities afforded by different ways of encountering a contemporary art exhibit. A quick glance around the space reveals a variety of media: light drawings (C-prints) hung on the walls on top of quilts, oil paintings and clay on canvas, tripods offering viewpoints of those paintings via various types of lens