Throughout his work, the artist addresses the liminal space of otherness, a reflection of his family’s journey and his own life experience as an entry point to discuss race, representation, erasure, and the memories of forgotten cultures and countries left behind.
[9] In his figurative works, Fallah takes central subjects and substitutes their exact likenesses with more holistic representations of their personhood, instead emphasizing aspects of their lives that span history, geography, and culture.
Fallah recontextualizes an otherwise rigid and familiar canonical system: through historically charged poses and compositions, coupled with the obscuring of the subjects actual portraits, the artist embraces ambiguity, weaving fact and fiction as a means of encompassing the many facets of a person’s identity.
The picture planes are flattened, layered, and stacked, bringing together imagery that the artist sources and reassembles from digitized museum collections, tumblr, library archives, and other ephemera.
[13] Composed of Arabesque decorative borders, the Grids draw a continuous thread between each compositional element, weaving together multiple narratives, eliminating any sense of hierarchy, and making connections where they might not otherwise exist.