‘Welcome to Hell’ says Hadi Fallahpisheh as you walk into his show. It’s written in gold-lined letters on frilled banners, a joyful introduction to an awful place.
Fallahpisheh doesn’t deal with the nice and fluffy side of life. Well, it’s here, in the shape of stuffed cuddly toys and brightly painted ceramics, but it’s all nightmarishly twisted and falling apart. Symbols of youth and nostalgia are everywhere. There are cosy quilts, a Joy Division duvet cover, cartoon cats painted on photographic paper and all those cuddly toys. But it’s childhood gone very badly wrong. Two mannequins of kids are shamefully facing the wall, a teddy bear has its head shoved into a pot with its legs spread, a painting shows a dog with an erection dreaming of a cat shagging a mouse.
There are fences all over the gallery, keeping you from getting close to the art, and three teddies are locked in a huge pink cage. As Fallahpisheh says in another banner work, this is a ‘prison of mind’, a jail made of childhood memories, torture at the hands of your sickly nostalgia and rose-tinted dreams of youth.
It feels like the photo paper paintings are the main focus here, and they’re tricky and interesting enough in their own right, but everything else here – the ceramics, the duvet covers, the prison bears, the teddies – just sort of distract you from them. Other artists have dabbled with the sinister teddy bear aesthetic – Paul McCarthy, Charlemagne Palestine – but none in quite as creepy or heavy-handedly cheesy a way. It’s hard to know if that’s a good thing or just a gross and very silly thing, but it sure makes for uncomfortable viewing.
