Artist Studio as a site of Refusal
Editorial Note: Accompanying Parham Ghalamdar’s award-winning film The Sight is a Wound (2025) is a document baring the title “ARTIST STUDIO AS A SITE OF REFUSAL”, which contains imagery from the film and a complimentary text that begins to elaborate and contextualise the work. This document is an important part of other texts that Parham is preparing currently, and so adding this document to our archives serves as a way of commemorating the beginning of a collaboration that we are excited about. You can read the PDF here or follow the link to download it.
With that in mind, we are today planting a seed, and, hopefully, setting in motion a series of collaborations based on a chance meeting that had a touch of destiny to it. While the story is always without a true beginning, for now it is enough to pin-point a particular moment where this becoming really burst into our reality. We launched Unconscious/Television (2025) back in January, in Lisbon, with a series of three events at three different places throughout the City. On the third night, we had arranged to host an edition of Open Secret, and by .. what to say, the grace of God? we found ourselves a group of 15 people assembled in Lisbon; some had come from as far as New York and Dubai to be there, including several people from the Open Secret group. We hosted this event in Casa Do Comum, which had a bookshop on one floor, and a screening room on another floor—it felt as though we were being given the screening room for free because the premise was that we would somehow promote Unconscious/Television and Dialogues on CoreCore somehow, and so the space could get paid from the sales. So we figured out a way to make this make sense, and so I found myself there, in Casa Do Comum, with a room full of people and a camera on me, about to attempt to tie a knot between Open Secret, Unconscious/Television and Dialogues on CoreCore.
I, in a very CoreCore style, concatenated these topics against each other, and in the way that someone lost at sea ends up adrift an island’s shore, by some luck, I ended up at the intersection between the Image (aesthetics) and the Eye (the self), armed with a quotation from a posthumous Jameson book, which states that we “evolved” aesthetics, or developed it, as a solution to the problem that consciousness is somehow fundamentally antagonistic. By giving somewhere for the Eye to rest, humanity wards off the supposedly irreparable schism between our Eye and the Look of the Other. I asked a pretty simplistic question about the Image of people gathered around something, whether that was a fire or television, and even these ideas of the sublime that are captured in The Wanderer Above the Fog, the feeling of staring into the Eye of God as you are floored by the view—or whatever—there is this romantic idea that powerful aesthetic Images can interrupt or ground this antagonistic nature of consciousness, or as Lucas Ferraço Nassif said, “Man can be set free of being Man”.
So I was giving this talk about the very specific topic of the Look, the Eye, Fire, Painting, literally Oil Paintings, such as the Monet called Breaking Up Of The Ice which you will find in a gallery in Lisbon. The talk itself was nothing groundbreaking, it was just an attempt to unearth some connections between some topics, as a part of “setting the scene” for Open Secret; it was an act of framing. I remember when Parham Ghalamdar was added to the line-up by the curator, because I remember that we had to hide an old poster and post a new one, with Parham’s name sticking out by itself. Becoming had nothing to do with the line-up, and we were deliberately waiting until the Lisbon event to watch the films we hadn’t seen before. So we sat for a few hours watching the films, and then comes the finale, The Sight is a Wound.
With a head crammed full of fire, paintings and eyes, I watched in disbelief as Parham’s film took the ideas that came up in my talk and quite literally set fire to them. It was vertiguous to say the least, and the message of the film could not have been more clear given the topics of the talk:
what if we burn the image down? where will we hide then? When all that is left of the burnt painting is the charred wooden frame, then what do we see? We see a world that has itself burned down, we see what has come to pass in our aesthetically anesthetised existence.
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