THE SIGHT IS A WOUND is a six-minute experimental video-poem confronting the ethical crisis of image-making in the digital age, particularly in response to the unfolding genocide in Gaza. In an act of aesthetic refusal, artist Parham Ghalamdar burns over 50 of his own paintings—works previously exhibited in renowned institutions worldwide—as a personal and political gesture against the overwhelming flood of atrocities visualized through screens.
Rather than documenting protest, the film meditates on complicity, desensitization, and the ethical failure of seeing. The act of burning becomes a ritual of unmaking, where the image collapses not as erasure, but as testimony to the impossibility of visual representation in the face of untranslatable horror.
Director Statement
This film is not a protest. It is a ritual.
THE SIGHT IS A WOUND was made in response to a growing paralysis: the flood of digital images documenting mass suffering, particularly in Gaza, and the simultaneous impossibility of responding adequately as an artist. I felt the weight of my own practice—my oil paintings—becoming complicit, obsolete, silent. So I burned them.
Not to erase, but to mark an end. To create a gesture that carries no aesthetic claim except collapse.
The act of destruction is not nihilistic—it is mourning, it is ethical rupture. It asks: what does it mean to “make images” in an age where images no longer invoke action or truth? Where seeing becomes a form of forgetting?
This film does not offer resolution. It performs disappearance.
—Parham Ghalamdar
Bio
Parham Ghalamdar is an Iranian-born, UK-based artist working across painting, moving image, AI-generated imagery, ceramics, and writing. His practice interrogates historical and philosophical narratives through a decolonial and speculative lens. He has exhibited at institutions including HOME (Manchester), Leeds Art University, Whitworth Gallery, and the Millennium Film Workshop (NYC). His short films have been awarded and screened internationally, including Berlin Kiez Film Festival, Open Secret touring program, and Dhaka Mythos. His work often examines the failure of representation, theology of images, and visual collapse in the age of digital saturation. Ghalamdar is a researcher at The New Centre for Research & Practice and a graduate of Manchester School of Art.
Directed, edited, written, and performed by: Parham Ghalamdar
Sound and music: Public domain archive and manipulated field recordings
Camera and documentation: Dean Brierly / Caustic Coastal
Paintings burned in the film were exhibited at HOME, Castlefield Gallery, The Lowry, Workplace Foundation, Salford Art Gallery & Museum, Abingdon Studios & Gallery, The Whitworth, Rebbeca Hosack Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery (2020–2024)
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
