By Parham Ghalamdar
The following text is the expanded script of the short film THE SIGHT IS A WOUND: https://youtu.be/u7abcDebhQE?si=coiO4alUBnCgjlDl
Introduction (Road Map)
This essay grapples with the ethical stakes of making and viewing images amid ongoing atrocities in Gaza. Section #1 initiates the conversation by examining the fundamental power inherent in oil painting and other forms of image-making. Section #2 locates Gaza’s live-streamed genocide at the heart of our moral urgency, asking how artists can respond—or whether they should respond at all.
Section #3 probes whether making new images in this context is inevitably complicit, while Section #4 highlights the shared vulnerability that binds us to Gaza’s plight. Section #5 explores cultural insularity, drawing parallels with the feedback loops of artificial intelligence. Section #6 indicts Western art’s sterile replication of obsolete forms, tying it to broader structures of privilege. Section #7 calls for the artist to become an “ontological hunter,” expanding the frontiers of thinking rather than retreating into outdated frameworks. Finally, the closing words challenge us to consider whether the most ethical choice might be to refrain from reproducing Gaza’s images altogether, resisting the pull toward aestheticization and voyeurism.
1. What is Image-Making, Especially Oil Painting?
Image-making, particularly through oil painting, is an audacious act of slicing through the vast, chaotic fabric of existence to isolate a fragment and imbue it with significance. It is not merely the act of representing; it is the act of elevating. The cosmos is infinite and incomprehensible, yet within the human sphere, we craft narrow windows—selective apertures—through which we choose to see and think. Oil painting, as one of the most tactile and visceral forms of image-making, historically served as a bridge between the tangible and the ineffable. It reduced the incomprehensible into something perceptible, something emotionally and intellectually digestible.
Yet in this act of cropping and framing, oil painting is also an exercise of power. It is a deliberate violence against the infinity of reality, selecting one narrative over the countless others. In our contemporary moment, this act of selection faces a profound ethical crisis, as the flood of images from the world’s most urgent tragedies challenges the very validity of image-making itself.
2. The Primacy of Gaza: Urgency and Ethical Responsibility
Since October 7, 2023, the imagery emanating from Gaza has commanded a unique and unparalleled gravity. These images are not just visual artifacts but urgent demands for recognition, ethical response, and historical reckoning. Never before has genocide been so thoroughly live-streamed, documented by the very perpetrators who invert victimhood and deploy advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to wage and narrativize their violence.
This event stands apart not merely because of its scale but because of its immediacy and hyper-mediated nature. The images from Gaza are not frozen frames of history; they are open wounds in real time. They confront us with the unbearable intimacy of suffering and the unrelenting urgency of solidarity. No artist, no image-maker, can claim to craft something more ethically pressing than these images. To turn away from this visual and moral torrent is to retreat into irrelevance or complicity.
3. Is Image-Making Complicit?
Theodor Adorno once proclaimed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” In the context of Gaza, we must extend this sentiment: to create images after Gaza, while ignoring the ethical gravity of its ongoing suffering, is barbaric. Image-making today risks being either an act of noise-making or an act of proximity—virtue signaling to power structures that sustain genocide.
Why Gaza, and why now? Because this is the first genocide not only meticulously documented but actively live-streamed by the perpetrator. It is a spectacle crafted by the oppressors themselves, delivered with technological precision to justify and perpetuate their violence. In this context, traditional image-making collapses under the weight of its own obsolescence. To paint, to draw, to construct images in the old paradigms is to relegate oneself to a position of irrelevance—or worse, to stand as an accomplice in systems of privilege that perpetuate suffering.
4. The Fear of Resurgence: Solidarity and Anticipation
Even from a place of relative safety, the specter of horror persists. This is not a fear rooted in distant abstraction but in a visceral understanding of shared vulnerability. To witness Gaza is to glimpse our own potential future. As Iranians, Persians, or members of any marginalized group, we sit at the same global banquet table where Palestinians are being devoured.
The systems that perpetuate this violence are not static; they are adaptive and cyclical. To ignore Gaza is to gamble with our own eventual erasure. The same mechanisms—technological, ideological, and militaristic—that have rendered Gaza a site of extermination will inevitably find new targets. Solidarity, then, is not merely a moral act; it is a strategic imperative, a recognition that the oppressor’s appetite knows no bounds.
We must stand not out of pity but out of a profound understanding of our interconnected fates. To resist now is to preempt future atrocities; to remain silent is to ensure that the cycle continues, with ourselves as its next victims.
In other words, our engagement with Palestinian suffering is not an act of charity but a necessary stand to preserve our philosophical and moral integrity, ensuring that the cycle of brutality does not simply shift to another group—or back onto us—tomorrow.
5. A Machine Without an Outside: The Collapse of Insularity
Culture functions as a machine, a self-regulating system that thrives on inputs from external sources. Without an “outside”—a stream of fresh ideas, challenges, and perspectives—a culture becomes an echo chamber, consuming its own output until it collapses into irrelevance. This phenomenon mirrors the behavior of artificial intelligence models trained on their own outputs, spiraling into hallucinations and disconnection from reality.
Western culture, entrenched in its own self-referential frameworks, risks this collapse. Its insularity creates a fragile edifice, disconnected from the voices of immigrants, refugees, and the marginalized—the “outside” forces that might save it from its own decay. The role of these voices is not to serve as exoticized tokens but as necessary disruptions, forcing the machine of culture to recalibrate and reflect.
For those ensconced in the dominant framework, the burden of dismantling this collapse lies within. Immigrants and refugees should not bear the weight of educating and reforming the privileged. Instead, the dominant culture must turn inward, engage in the labor of deconstruction, and create avenues for genuine engagement with the outside. A machine without an outside will implode; only by embracing external realities can it achieve renewal.
6. Western Painters: The Spectacle of Sterile Replication
The brushes of white painters remain unbroken, their canvases unscarred by the upheavals of this epoch. Why, in the face of overwhelming human suffering, do they persist in replicating the banalities of pre-October 2023 art? This is not mere ignorance but complicity—a refusal to rupture the aesthetic inertia that props up systems of privilege and domination.
The resurgence of figurative painting parallels the rise of far-right ideologies, both anchored in nostalgia and resistance to change. Contemporary art often fetishizes curtains, an apt metaphor for its necrophiliac obsession with stagnation; the very etymological meaning of the “Apocalypse” is “to lift up the curtain and reveal”. Like a passionless affair with a corpse, this art produces nothing generative. It serves as a mechanism for accumulating virtue signals tailored to whiteness, distracting us from the fires of a collapsing world.
Image-making, in its essence, is an act of violence—a deliberate rupture of reality to frame and elevate a fragment for contemplation. Historically, oil painting bridged reality and perception, but this bridge has disintegrated. The images pouring out of Gaza have shattered our paradigms, demanding an undivided attention that renders traditional art forms obsolete.
To continue painting as if nothing has changed is to exist in aesthetic and moral dissonance. The practice of conventional painting must be interrogated and its ethical implications reevaluated. We are called to abandon the sterile repetition of the past and engage with the unrelenting truths of our fractured present.
7. What Image-Makers Must Do: The Ontological Hunter
In the aftermath of our unveiled apocalypse, the artist’s role is no longer that of a passive observer or insular creator. The artist must become an ontological hunter, a nomadic agent navigating the abyss of thought and perception to extract fragments of the unknown. This hunter does not merely traverse existing terrains but expands the collective metaphysical frontiers of their community.
By crafting new metaphors and semiotic vessels, the artist transcends the conceptual limitations of their time, enabling society to move beyond its stagnant paradigms. However, this task demands a confrontation with whiteness—not merely as a color but as a spectral construct entangled with colonial legacies and ideological sclerosis. The failure to disentangle the epidermal from the ideological marks the stagnation of thought and artistic mediation.
In regions like Iran, where the allure of “Aryan” identity perpetuates delusions of grandeur, the entrapment within whiteness mirrors that of the West. The artist must resist the messianic motifs of cultural narcissism—those genocidal curtains draped over reality. Instead, they must venture beyond their insular trenches and engage in a dialectic dance with the Outside. This is not an aesthetic choice but an ethical imperative to rupture ossified frameworks and embrace chaotic multiplicities.
The burden of dismantling these frameworks does not rest on the marginalized alone. Those ensconced in privilege must undertake the labor of self-education and deconstruction. The hunter must turn inward, navigating the labyrinth of complicity to emerge as a transformative force. Only through this dialectic can anger be transmuted into love and love into an unyielding pursuit of truth and liberation.
Final words… Witnessing Without Appropriating
Perhaps the most ethically urgent act in the face of Gaza’s unfolding tragedy is to refrain from using its images altogether. In a world already saturated by broadcasts of suffering—often edited and circulated for shock value—replicating this imagery risks turning it into political or violent pornography. When the raw documentation of genocide becomes another commodity, another aesthetic object for gallery walls or social media feeds, we lose sight of the very humanity it claims to reveal.
Refusal, in this context, is not a passive turning away; it is a deliberate choice to witness without appropriating. By declining to reproduce these harrowing images, we resist feeding a spectacle that can numb rather than awaken. We acknowledge the unspeakable weight they carry, refusing to transmute that weight into a marketable form of sympathy or outrage.
Such refusal is not an abdication of responsibility. On the contrary, it is a demand for deeper ethical engagement—one that goes beyond the visual. We can still speak, mourn, and act on behalf of those who suffer, but we do so without diluting their pain into another performance of artistry or empathy. By honoring the rawness of Gaza’s reality, we respect both the immediacy of its suffering and the limits of our own capacity to represent it. Only then can we begin to move beyond voyeurism and toward genuine solidarity.
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