APP
APP Creative Commissions 2024/25
Leeds Arts University’s APP Creative Commissions support artists from under‑represented communities and privilege research with students and staff. Parham Ghalamdar was awarded an APP Creative Commission for 2024‑2025.
Untitled glazed ceramic by Parham Ghalamdar, 40 x 15 x 15 cm, 2025
UNKNOWN UNKNOWN
Ghalamdar proposed the Unknown Unknown project, which treats clay as a critical, post‑humanist medium. Ceramics are framed as deep objects that can preserve trace DNA via adsorption to clay minerals and entrapment in micropores, carrying history while projecting futures. Forms sit between tool and spacecraft so each work reads as a time capsule.
Structure
1/// Reading group: James Elkins’ What Painting Is (1998) for its focus on material agency and studio process; Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia (2008) for desert matter as conspiratorial agent; Maya B. Kronic’s A Brief History of Geotrauma (2019) for trauma and deep time; J. Posadas’ Flying Saucers... (1968) for a radical futurist reading of technology; and Srnicek & Williams’ ACCELERATE: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (2013) for linking speculation to political horizons. These texts were read sequentially, with close reading followed by mapping key terms into clay prompts, so that philosophical and political concepts could be translated directly into drawing and form making.
2/// Workshops: translate theory to drawing and clay through guided prompts and one‑to‑one support.
3/// Sharing: on‑campus presentation and documentation. Fired works kept by participants. Unfired clay recycled.
Deliverables
Glazed terracotta and stoneware pieces developed with participants.
A programme of theory‑led sessions and documentation.
A full colour artist book containing documentation of the project, short stories by Parham Ghalamdar to contextualise the ceramics, introduction by Dr Marianna Tsionki, interlude by Dr Jason B. Mohaghegh, and outro by Reza Negarestani will be published in May 2026.
Solo exhibition invitation at Leeds Arts University’s Blenheim Walk Gallery, May 2026.
Glazed ceramics by artist Parham Ghalamdar, and art students Daisy Ledgard, Laura Kovacova, Charlie Connolly, and Mehrzad Ghasemi.
Film: Burial Without Body
A 12 minute video‑poem that imagines terrains the ceramics emerge from and builds the project’s world using AI imagery, layered sound and a deliberate 854x480 lo‑fi resolution so pixelation and flicker become material. Featured in Ghosts in the Feedback Loop. Conceptual frame informed by Jason Mohaghegh’s Loser Gods and Deities seminars at The New Centre for Research & Practice.
Dr J. B. Mohaghegh honoured the film and wrote a short text on it, which will appear both in the upcoming artist book for the APP Creative Commission project and in his own forthcoming book on secret societies in 2026.
Acknowledgements
Unknown Unknown was developed as part of the 2024/25 APP Creative Commissions Programme awarded to Parham Ghalamdar. The project involved students Daisy Ledgard, Laura Kovacova, Charlie Connolly, and Mehrzad Ghasemi, with collaboration from Associate Professor Marianna Tsionki, University Curator at Leeds Arts University, alongside staff Luke Staunton, Maja Novak, Robin Gonnet, Laura da Costa, and Aoife Larkin. Their contributions and support shaped the project’s material and conceptual trajectory.
EMBEDDED MEDIA
https://www.youtube.com/embed/McLaItNpGpY
