“Fallahpisheh is a photographer who makes pictures without a camera, using a special darkroom process to expose objects to photosensitive paper. For [this series], he rigged an electrical circuit to the surface of the paper and then threw balls (volleyballs, basketballs, baseballs) at the paper from across the dark room. The balls would trigger the enlarger on contact, and objects placed in front of it (in this case, bits of fences and barriers) were exposed instantaneously, leaving ghostly silhouettes on the surface.
To draw the beguiling character in Blind Rat, he took a flashlight and held it very close to the paper, leaving what look like burn marks on the surface through over exposure. Much of this process is illegible on sight, but for Fallahpisheh, his performance in the darkroom—throwing balls and burning paper as a “photographer”—is an absurdity akin to the machinations he’s asked to enact as an Iranian migrant to the US, the performance of an ‘immigrant.’
The ways these two performances converge form the crux of his work […] Fallahpisheh’s [photographs] seek to destabilize the assumptions behind both terms—immigrant, artist—and is made acutely trenchant through its darkly humorous take on the conditions of displacement behind both.”
— Simon Wu, The Brooklyn Rail