Review of The Sight is a Wound (2025)
A review of Parham Ghalamdar’s The Sight is a Wound (2025), which I saw at Open Secret Lisbon, an event that was a part of the launch of Unconscious/Television (2025). In the words of Lucas Ferraço Nassif, “I had to look over my shoulder to confirm the Image was real”. With a head full of fire, paintings and eyes, I watched in disbelief as Parham’s film excavated everything that I struggled to elaborate on in my talk not one hour before; the occurrence was synchronous to the point of prophetic. In that moment, an alliance was, not forged but uncovered, as my meagre attempt at a lecture was transformed into a perfect accompaniment to The Sight is a Wound. In that collision, I saw Parham’s film as a manifesto with a clear question: what if we burn the image down? where will we hide then? When all that’s left is the charred wooden frame, what do we see then? We see a world that has burned down, we see what has come to pass in our aesthetically anesthetised existence. This review attempts to frame the intersection between my “lecture” and Parham’s film.
The Sight is a Wound (2025) is a short film produced by Parham Ghalamdar which features the burning of dozens of his own oil paintings in response to the images that have, for 587 days, spilled out of Palestine like blood onto social media timelines and establishment media outlets. The imagery that Gaza has exuded streams like pyroclastic flows, incinerating everything around it, and has seared our eyes; what use is aesthetics if we can no longer bear to look?
Beyond a mere protest or a declaration of despair, this film contains within it a manifesto. In Seminar XI, regarding la regard, Lacan makes the suggestion that aesthetics—in this case “the picture”—exist as a way of capturing the Gaze of the Other, effectively disrupting or resolving temporarily a process that is otherwise, for a human being, fundamentally antagonistic. We know we exist because of the Look of the Other; other people are looking at me, so there must be a me. It is this process, the determination of ourselves as beings, which is taken to be fundamentally antagonistic, caused by a schism between the Eye and the Look.
It is to mediate this conflict, or negotiate this schism, between Eye and Gaze, which Lacan assigns aesthetics the task of. Through aestheticisation, we mitigate the antagonism at the heart of being; a miraculous, promethean flame that wards off in advance, our potential for depravity. I imagine here a scene of humans sitting around a fire, telling stories, keeping warm in its heat, and gazing into the light. The image of the fire capturing our gaze. To paraphrase Lucas Ferraço Nassif again, in the undulating image of the fire, in the anamorphological circuitry sketched out by the flames, Man is set free of being Man.
Yet, we live in a moment characterised by the over-production—or should I say mass proliferation qua cancer—of images, a society mediated by, not just images, but derivative simulations, and not just simulations, but groundless, nihilistic simulacra. In the hyperreal world, images aren’t just painkillers, but an intravenous drip of morphine that has plunged us into a desensitised, anesthetised state—it has become hard to make eye contact, let alone maintain it for long enough to be reminded that the Other is our maker, without whom we cannot identify ourselves.
The image of genocide is an abomination that has reared its ugly face in the last century—we have all seen enough—it is the cancer within the image-system. And so we might respond, as Parham does, by burning the image—literally setting it ablaze after dousing it with anointed sacrificial petroleum. In doing so, Parham paradoxically produces a new image, one where the blackened, charred frames of once colourful oil paintings now house the image of a burning horizon; a reality check as the fourth wall collapses and smoke seems to pour out of the television: “wait, that’s fire is real”.
It can seem that aesthetics is over; it’s dead, it’s cancerous, and our eyes have been scorched. And yet, this is not the first time we have been here. We have arrived again at the Pontus of Adorno, in his famous question about art after Auschwitz. At first he, in his despair, decrees that no art can be made after genocide, that it is insensitive or callous, or worse, that it can desensitise, as in anesthetise, atrocities by turning them into detached objects. Yet later, he introduces into the discourse the idea that silence is also unacceptable, that art must be produced as a part of a retaliatory noise. Parham’s theoretical work in the accompanying document positions art in a similar way, with this notion of the site of refusal. We could think along similar lines of Adorno, that silence is unacceptable, but we must think very carefully about the images we produce. The Sight is a Wound is a phenomenal example of this “radically transformed art” qua Adorno, that neither consoles nor reconciles, but remembers and resists.
If you burned all the images in your view, what would remain in the exposed frames?
To paraphrase Lucas Ferraço Nassif one last time: Man used to be the hunter of images, but now we are hunted by the image. Parham Ghalamdar’s The Sight is a Wound shows us one way to fight back.