Aerotheology

ANSGAR: All manner of practices seem to me questionable now, and yes, framing an image foremost among them. Or at least, their questionable nature has become only more urgent. All institutions that have survived the genocide unperturbed are suspect, not merely those which have directly facilitated it. All habits too have taken up the quality of passive consent, even the most mundane habits that carry us through the day. When I swipe in at work, I consent to the military-industrial complex in the most immediate way, but I knew about that ever since I was first employed as a Lecturer and I have been passively consenting ever since, in one sense, whilst exploring dissenting activities elsewhere. But this schism seems no longer available (the idea that a critic is someone who finds a space of criticism and a space of living and employment and accepts, even if only unhappily, that there will be a disjuncture between them). This new situation (not new, but newly urgent) places all who would consider themselves critics in a predicament of existential reckoning beyond which point the old habits of criticism (which presumed the survival of the critic) cannot be sustained.

Your paintings were trapped in a gallery, is that right? Is this how they survived THE SIGHT IS A WOUND, your 2025 video essay (your ‘funeral of the image’)?

PARHAM: Yes, some of the paintings survived because they were trapped in galleries, collections, storage spaces or other people’s homes. They were beyond my reach when I made THE SIGHT IS A WOUND. The film could only burn the paintings that had remained with me.

I use the word “survived” cautiously. Survival usually carries a positive charge, but here it might describe the persistence of an object after the artist has withdrawn their belief from it. The paintings remained intact because they had already entered systems of ownership. Their institutional value protected them from the judgment that produced the film.

That contradiction became useful. The funeral of the image could never be completed. The corpse had already been distributed.

When some of those paintings returned to me, I did not want simply to burn them again. I covered them with scorched-earth pigment instead. This was less a second attempt at destruction than an admission that destruction itself can become theatrical. Burning a painting produces a strong image. It can be circulated and absorbed back into the same art system it claims to reject. Even iconoclasm can become content.

This is part of what troubles me about contemporary art’s thematic response to everything, including genocide. The problem is not simply silence. Art has become remarkably capable of being sympathetic to genocide while continuing to imagine itself as politically serious. Institutions release statements and organise discussions but they only display carefully framed grief, while preserving their funding relationships and access to power. They are not always openly pro-genocide. They are genocide-friendly in a more functional sense meaning that: genocide can occur without disturbing their fundamental operations.

The art world has developed an enormous capacity to metabolise atrocity. Dead children become subject matter. Ruins become visual language. Testimony becomes programming. It all becomes nothing but data for another AI model. Political urgency becomes a curatorial tone. The institution can appear distressed while remaining structurally comfortable.

Perhaps this is why the unfinished or obstructed state of the works matters to me. I did not want Aerotheology to offer a coherent position from which the spectator could observe violence, then feel appropriately affected, and finally leave morally restored with catharsis. The spectator’s lack of agency, which you identified, might also be a refusal of the fantasy that looking is itself an adequate political act.

I am increasingly suspicious of art that offers the experience of dissent without its cost. Much contemporary political art allows everyone involved to retain their existing position: the artist remains an artist, the curator remains a curator, the collector remains a collector, and the spectator departs feeling that something has been confronted. Genocide becomes another condition under which the exhibition successfully opens.

This does not mean that art should cease. I am not sure I believe that, despite sometimes wanting to. But perhaps art should lose the confidence that its continuation is automatically defensible. It should have to explain why it deserves space, money and attention while a genocide is being transmitted in real time. Most of the time, perhaps %99.9 of the time, it cannot.

The paintings that escaped the fire therefore returned as compromised objects. They had been preserved by the very system whose moral authority I no longer trusted. Covering them did not purify them. The black pigment did not turn them into ethical paintings. It placed their survival under suspicion.

Perhaps my next step begins there: not with the idea that art can bear witness to catastrophe, but with the less flattering question of what kind of object continues to exist comfortably beside it.

Aerotheology, Parham Ghalamdar, 3 May - 1 August 2026, Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds.

The stereotypically white, aseptic environment of the gallery space always projects a kind of death and seems to me most appropriately mirrored in the blank, washed-out visage of the uncomprehending yet reverent spectator. This seems a particularly haunting context in which to assemble an exhibition assembled around the work of the Iranian-British artist, Parham Ghalamdar that draws from “conceptual infrastructures shaped by Iran”—a country under siege, a country already well washed with blood—with the seemingly obligatory plinths and pedestals and Perspex boxes, alternately elevating its objects or removing the smaller ones from the possibility of being touched. The death projected by these walls launder their own violences under the sign of blankness, and collides, in this case, with a series of objects that stage multiple interventions against its pallid complexion and the dull awareness (that our society permits) of ongoing destruction and collusion in that destruction. These include the three flags, WATER/OIL/BLOOD, the AI mediated images printed on aluminium that seem caught in some kind of Fata Morgana, a kind of sorcery that is yet also mere physics, the concoction of clay totems pigmented by scorched earth in the wake of ISIS, the collapse of domestic glass objects into broken ceramic pots following extreme heat treatment, jet bomber-like clay statuettes variously shrivelled and putrefied, and the ambiguous canvases that seem determined not to settle on a fixed image or at best only a fragment of what might have been a picture. Beyond the objects themselves, there is a certain disregard of gallery mechanics within the arrangement of things, most notably a full canvas hidden behind another identically-sized piece, or a smaller canvas visible through the gaps of two larger peers, these can be walked behind too, as if the artist could not quite bring themselves to set it all out for the spectator to alternate between and politely nod at. And then, the clay ‘feet’ or ‘anchors’ into which the main aluminium-printed images are inserted—these were evidently thrown into their form in situ and allowed to dry, ‘evidently’ because there are still traces of that process in the floor, smeared marks of ochre clay against the otherwise pristine white underlay, as if again the person responsible seemed not quite minded to clear up before it was too late and the clay was set, deftly, craftily, subtly once more, showing a degree of disregard (even contempt?) for the expectations of crisp and sanitary display.

These, at least, were my initial reflections after visiting the exhibition in early June, a month into its four-month term. What follows is an extended conversation conducted by email with Parham Ghalamdar, prompted by that visit.

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ANSGAR: Could you tell me a little about the provenance of this exhibition, particularly insofar as it predates the current war, and how the distance between that early conception and the situation within which the exhibition was assembled in early May 2026 might be understood?

PARHAM: I did not predict the current war. I would not want to give the work that false prophetic status. The war feels less like an event arriving from nowhere than another turn in a loop that was already moving.

The exhibition began before the current escalation, but it was already concerned with aerial violence and the distance of the archive. In the broadest sense, I was imagining an institution more than a thousand years from now trying to account for the wars now unfolding across the Middle East. I was thinking about how this time might be preserved once its witnesses are gone. What would survive as evidence? Who would cry for our dead? Who would remember our names?

When the current war arrived, it did not arrive as an external event that suddenly changed the work. It entered a structure that was already there. The forms became harder to separate from bombardment. The scorched earth pigment became harder to treat as material alone. The exhibition was made before this moment, but the moment made its grammar harsher.

I also find it hard to believe in the stability of any ceasefire or memorandum when what I see as the wider genocidal project remains intact. These agreements often pause the image of war rather than ending the condition of war. Aerotheology sits in that suspended time, between the promise that violence has stopped and the knowledge that it has only changed altitude.

I wonder if this connects with your reading of the gallery space. When you walked through the exhibition, did the white cube feel like it was containing the violence, or did it feel as if the violence had begun to contaminate the room?

ANSGAR: I am not sure that either option occurred to me at the time. The space seemed to me more readily understood as contaminated by, not so much violence, as a series of awkward questions regarding now the spectator (and the exhibition) was relating to that violence. And I mean this positively, insofar as everyday repertoires seem quite limited in that respect.

Insofar as the white cube, as you describe it, enacts its own violence, that is less readily perceived (I would think), at least to the extent visitors are expected to be willing (or at least, submissive) participants in this kind of gallery space. It is a matter of habituation, and so erasure.

Your mention of the archival element is interesting in this respect, and the exhibition seems to me less of an archiving effort in its own right (in the sense of saving a set of sensibilities for posterity), and more of an appeal to the archive-concept as a device to reposition our relationship to the present. And this, to me, raises not so much the question, 'What would you like to have saved for posterity?' (which is a disingenuous question, it treats the archive like a time capsule), rather, this much more an issue of confronting how the construction of the archive is itself achieved by a process of distortion and dismemberment.

As I experienced it, the exhibition makes reference to archival concepts but also holds them at a distance, to some extent. For instance, the careful arrangement of objects on clean surfaces that were nonetheless blemished by the clay feet, the display case centrepiece situated in contrast to canvasses around the edge that seemed at the point of being put up or taken down (trapped as if in mid-assembly, as if their place in the archive was in question). This seemed to me quite deliberate and performative. And in all of this the spectator appears to have little agency (and I mean this not as a criticism, but as a notable part of the performative effect).

There would be many other readings, of course. These were just some of the things that occurred to me. Could you tell me a little more about the scorched earth pigment? This also struck me at the time (it was mentioned in the exhibition information sheet) and I have been carrying it (the thought of it) with me ever since.

PARHAM: I think your reading of the archive is right. I do not see the exhibition as an attempt to save things for the future in any pure sense. I am suspicious of that desire. The archive is never innocent. Still, an imperfect attempt at preservation might be better than silence. I see the exhibition, and my practice more broadly, as a way of curating deep objects and sending them forward across the threshold of existential crisis. The archive decides what is allowed to survive and what must be left behind, but perhaps the work can expose that decision as a wound rather than hide it as care.

I have been conscious for a long time that I operate through an ontological lexicon that has very little symmetry with the ones around me. I do not mean this as a private eccentricity. I experience it as a real pressure. It feels like a war over meaning: which values are allowed to pass into the future, and which ones are treated as noise.

That is why the unfinished state of the paintings matters. Your observation is right. The paintings are literally unfinished. Some are abandoned halfway. Others survived my attempt to erase them.

I think painting is an exhausted medium. I say this as someone trained through painting, and still bound to it. Painting has lost much of its force as a tool for philosophical inquiry. Today it mostly performs two functions: it accumulates capital, or it manufactures innocence for those who need to appear sensitive while remaining attached to violence (the genocidal pedophilic upper class). In that sense, most painting today risks becoming slop. By slop, I mean what remains when care has left the process. Maybe, painting is neither dead or a zombie; Painting is a vampire.

The best painting today might be the one the painter decided not to paint at all.

Making an image now carries a violence of priority. To frame something from the infinite world is to say: this deserves your attention. But the most urgent images are already here. No image I make deserves more attention than the images of genocide coming out of Gaza. Painting, as a way of making meaning, becomes almost impossible inside a world saturated by live images of genocide. If the old claim was that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, then painting after Gaza risks the same.

Admitting this was painful. I had to face the possibility that the thing I was trained to do was dead, or at least dead for me in its inherited form. So I began to ask what else painting could become once image-making no longer felt morally available. That is where the scorched earth pigment entered the work.

The pigment is made from scorched earth from Iraq. This means it becomes political before it is used to paint any political image. The material is already a witness. It carries a history before I ask it to represent anything. The painting is therefore a landscape before it depicts one.

I had planned to destroy some older works by covering them fully with this black pigment. I kept postponing it. Then, when Israel bombed Tehran, I was too depressed to do anything else. I went to the studio and began covering these older colourful paintings with the black paint. While doing this, I realised a new image had appeared. It looked as if I were seeing something bright through the dust and smoke of bombardment.

That image felt honest to me. It did not redeem the painting or solve the problem. It admitted failure. That mattered more. I think an honest failure can sometimes be more moral than a finished work that still believes in its own authority.

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PARHAM GHALAMDAR is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield whose work traces forgotten mythologies, buried philosophies, and visual ruins into speculative worlds where memory, fiction, and futurism collapse. Working across painting, film, and theory-fiction, he explores cybernetics, simulation, and generative AI as mediators of history and possibility. Recent solo exhibitions include Painting, An Unending at HOME, Manchester, and Deep Desert Objekt at Pipeline Contemporary, London. His work is held in the Government Art Collection.

ANSGAR ALLEN is editor-in-chief at Erratum Press and author of books including Midden Hill, The Sick List and The Wake and the Manuscript.

[photos © Ansgar Allen]

Sheffield, UK