Good Eye Projects Residency Program Spring 2025 cohort
Good Eye Projects Residency Program Spring 2025 cohort
From February to May 2025, Parham Ghalamdar was in residence at Good Eye Projects in London as part of the spring cohort. He was introduced and recommended by Pipeline Contemporary Gallery. Rather than producing new paintings, Ghalamdar redefined the studio as a site of refusal. The space became a forensic zone expanding on his award-winning film The Sight is a Wound, which confronts the collapse of image-making in the face of live-streamed atrocity. The film stages the burning of 50 paintings as a refusal to aestheticise suffering. This residency extended that gesture, turning the studio into a terrain of mourning, complicity, and withdrawal from representation. The works presented here emerged from that radical reorientation of studio logic.
The Becoming Press has generously published and archived the PDF version of ARTIST STUDIO AS A SITE OF REFUSAL: https://becoming.press/aristist-studio-as-site-of-refusal-by-parham-ghalamdar - download it for free here.
Special thanks to Good Eye Projects and Pipeline Contemporary Gallery for their support and generosity. Thanks also to fellow artists in the Spring 2025 cohort: Mark Burch, Sofía Clausse, Roudhah Al Mazrouei, Sonya Derviz, and Amélie McKee.
ARTIST STUDIO AS A SITE OF REFUSAL Artist Book:
This limited-edition artist publication extends the refusal enacted in the film and installation. Printed in stark black and white with a colour cover, the book draws from Iranian clandestine publications in both format and urgency. It includes diagrams, stills, theoretical reflections, and documentation of the burning—a call to confront visual complicity. Structured like a forensic dossier, it carries the imprint of a studio turned into a post-mortem site for painting. Authored during the residency, it ponders what it means for a painter to go on a painting residency and not paint; how painting might be approached not as surface embellishment but as a philosophical and ethical enterprise.
A0 Aluminium Panel:
A0 aluminium print from THE SIGHT IS A WOUND, installed on mounds of clay and the ashes of over 50 oil paintings burned in refusal. The panel resists traditional mounting, asserting weight and instability as a political and aesthetic strategy. The image itself—frames within fire—marks the collapse of representation as a reliable witness. Burning an image on paper can feel like a romanticised act of rebellion; but aluminium, as a resistant surface, refuses both erasure and sentimentality. Even when the image vanishes, the carrier remains—a mute, enduring refusal.
Colour Palette Display:
A forensic archive of thirty burnt colour palettes encased under glass. Each tray carries the chromatic residue of a destroyed painting, now recontextualised as evidence rather than tool. The display embodies a shift from generative labour to reflective excavation. Originally formed from dried scrapings of oil paint from glass palettes between 2018–2024, these fragments are now catalogued and sealed, transformed from the incidental into the archival.
A4 Aluminium Prints on Palette:
A dismantled image archive. These small A4 aluminium panels, stills from THE SIGHT IS A WOUND, are placed face down on a blue wooden pallet—except for one: a burning scene with the subtitle ‘image has turned on us’. The arrangement proposes a digital graveyard, where storage meets surrender. Hung on industrial zinc-plated hooks in the studio, they are durable yet displaced, caught between visibility and refusal.
IMAGE CAPTIONS
dsc-0157-small-8b3b46.jpg: ARTIST STUDIO AS A SITE OF REFUSAL Artist Book: — This limited-edition artist publication extends the refusal enacted in the film and installation. Printed in stark black and white with a colour cover, the book draws from Iranian clandestine publications in both format and urgency. It includes diagrams, stills, theoretical reflections, and documentation of the burning—a call to confront visual complicity. Structured like a forensic dossier, it carries the imprint of a studio turned into a post-mortem site for painting. Authored during the residency, it ponders what it means for a painter to go on a painting residency and not paint; how painting might be approached not as surface embellishment but as a philosophical and ethical enterprise.
dsc-0118-8b3b46.jpg: A0 Aluminium Panel: — A0 aluminium print from THE SIGHT IS A WOUND, installed on mounds of clay and the ashes of over 50 oil paintings burned in refusal. The panel resists traditional mounting, asserting weight and instability as a political and aesthetic strategy. The image itself—frames within fire—marks the collapse of representation as a reliable witness. Burning an image on paper can feel like a romanticised act of rebellion; but aluminium, as a resistant surface, refuses both erasure and sentimentality. Even when the image vanishes, the carrier remains—a mute, enduring refusal.
dsc-0122-copy-c268eb.jpg: Colour Palette Display: — A forensic archive of thirty burnt colour palettes encased under glass. Each tray carries the chromatic residue of a destroyed painting, now recontextualised as evidence rather than tool. The display embodies a shift from generative labour to reflective excavation. Originally formed from dried scrapings of oil paint from glass palettes between 2018–2024, these fragments are now catalogued and sealed, transformed from the incidental into the archival.
20250512-161802-copy-373116.jpg: A4 Aluminium Prints on Palette: — A dismantled image archive. These small A4 aluminium panels, stills from THE SIGHT IS A WOUND, are placed face down on a blue wooden pallet—except for one: a burning scene with the subtitle ‘image has turned on us’. The arrangement proposes a digital graveyard, where storage meets surrender. Hung on industrial zinc-plated hooks in the studio, they are durable yet displaced, caught between visibility and refusal.
