با دستبسته.چیزی دست داد.چیزی دست نداد.
آنها دستبالا داشتن.دستپایینبگیر.
دستنشانده.
چیزها بالای سر ما دستبهدست شدن.
دستنگهداشتیم. دست نگه نداشتیم.دست به دهان.
دستشستن از تو آسان نیست.دستپاک بودن کار دستمان میدهد. به کف دستهایش نگاه کرد.
دستان به زندگی آلوده. حقیقت را دستکاری کردن. یکدست کردن. دستمالی کردن.
دستبهعصا راه رفتن. دستپر بودن.دستخالی بودن. دستدرکار. دستبهگریبان. حادثهای دست داد
حادثه دست نداد. دسترویدست گذاشتیم. دست روی هیچ
Tied hands.
They had the upper hand. We had our own hand to play.
Do you need a hand? A firm hand. Second-hand. First-hand.
Hands off. Heavy-handed.
We were on hand. Take matters into hand. More than a handful. Never in hand.
In the hands of the law. Forced their hand.
Underhanded. Hand in hand. Blood on their hands.
On the other hand —Washed our hands.
Not in hand. Out of hand
Finger on touch screen collage, 2021
This is the final week to see The Centre Never Held. I will be @noshowspace from 12–6 PM on Saturday, July 19, which is the final day of the exhibition.
Thank you to everyone who has visited so far.
Opening tonight Raha Farazmand, The Centre Never Held
Please join us for the opening preview Thursday 19 June, 6:30 - 8:30pm at No Show Space, London
Exhibition runs 20 June to 19 July 2025
Open Wed - Sat, 12 - 6 pm or by appointment
No Show Space is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Iranian artist Raha Farazmand @rahazmand
Raha Farazmand (b. 1983, Tehran, Iran) lives and works in London. She completed The Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School @royaldrawingschool in 2022 and qualified as an architect in 2017 having studied at the Architectural Association, London @aaschool and Yazd University, Iran.
Image: Raha Farazmand, Non-transcendentally Figurative-1, 2025
Soft Pastel on Pastelmat, 24 x 30 cm
Bijar, Iran; The daily sheep kill 1914-1918. A small party of starving men and women fighting for the entrails
Despite his well-documented role in enabling famines in both Iran and India—catastrophes that claimed millions of lives—Winston Churchill was voted the “Greatest Briton of All Time” in a 2002 BBC poll, and he continues to be widely revered in British public memory. This adulation reflects not only the enduring power of wartime myth-making, but also a profound unwillingness among many Britons to confront the darker chapters of their imperial past. For those who voted to elevate Churchill as a national hero, the image of the defiant wartime leader has eclipsed the devastating consequences of his imperial policies. His central role in presiding over—and in some cases exacerbating—famines that destroyed entire populations remains largely absent from mainstream British education, media, and public discourse. The celebration of Churchill as a symbol of national greatness, while ignoring his complicity in crimes against humanity, speaks to a broader historical blindness: a refusal to reckon with the brutal realities of empire, and the suffering it inflicted on millions beyond Britain’s shores.
This selective memory is not merely a historical oversight—it is symptomatic of a deeper cultural phenomenon in Britain, where the formal end of empire has not brought an end to imperial thinking embedded in British culture manifesting in the enduring glorification of imperial figures, the marginalisation of colonial atrocities, and the projection of global influence through soft power and nostalgia. The legacy of empire thus continues to shape national identity, policymaking, and public sentiment, long after the imperial flag was lowered.
The Centre Never Held, 20 June to 19 July 2025
Please join us for the opening preview Thursday 19 June, 6:30 - 8:30pm at No Show Space, London @noshowspace
Exhibition open Wed - Sat, 12 - 6 pm or by appointment
“No show space is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Iranian artist Raha Farazmand
The Centre Never Held probes the fragility and mutability of allegory in painting. Farazmand combines the abstract and figurative to examine how meaning, once rooted in specific cultural, political, or moral contexts, becomes unstable over time and is revealed as a precarious construct, shifting and fragmenting across time and culture.
These evocative paintings are in control of what is revealed and what is left to intrigue and suggestion.
This tension is achieved with an understanding and deft handling of the medium, whether oil on canvas or pastel on paper.
Farazmand’s work stages a dialogue between the monumental theatricality of Peter Paul Rubens’ Baroque canvases and the narrative subtlety of Kamal al-Din Behzad’s Persian miniatures. Behzad and Rubens were both court painters who served expansionist empires: Behzad under the Timurids and later the Safavids, and Rubens under the Spanish Habsburgs and various Catholic monarchs. Both used images to support imperial authority, though their approaches and cultural frameworks differed.
Farazmand situates these historical works within contemporary anxieties about media representation and the distortions of meaning in today’s visual culture.
Through these transregional and historical parallels, The Centre Never Held reveals a body of work that traces the erosion of fixed meaning, questions the authority of the image, and invites multiple, even contradictory, interpretations. Revealing painting itself as a site of negotiation, slippage, and critical possibility.”
