Zhaleh Farhoumand - Contemporary Fingerprint Artist
Her practice is rooted in connection, touch and identity, exploring what remains human in an increasingly digital world.
About Zhaleh Farhoumand
Zhaleh Farhoumand is a contemporary artist based in Brighton, England, who redefines portraiture through the intimate medium of fingerprints. Renowned for her distinctive fingerprint portraits, she creates images solely with the imprint of her non-dominant right index finger, transforming human touch into both material and metaphor. Although she is ambidextrous, Zhaleh deliberately restricts herself to this single gesture, embracing limitation as a means to enhance the raw immediacy of mark-making.
Her artistic journey began in childhood, influenced by a home rich with paintings, masks, and sculptures collected by her parents, whose passion for auctions and antiques immersed her early in the language of objects and histories. She pursued her studies at Chelsea College of Arts (Foundation in Art) and the University of Brighton (BA in Printed Textile Design with Business). Upon returning to painting, her background in textiles continues to inform her sensitivity to surfaces, layering, and composition.
Drawing on her Persian and South African heritage, Zhaleh Farhoumand’s practice delves into the richness of human diversity and the universal traces we leave behind. Her fingerprint portraits celebrate the individuality of faces across cultures, while the fingerprint, a marker of identity and mortality, becomes the skin, structure, and memory of the artwork itself.
Following the death of her father, a psychiatrist whose work shaped her lifelong interest in faces and psychology, her art evolved into an exploration of impermanence and legacy. In her practice, fingerprints serve as both evidence of existence and a voice that endures beyond life, unique and unrepeatable.
For Zhaleh, these works are not created in the traditional sense but through the intimate act of human touch. Each fingerprint serves as a personal mark that bridges the personal and universal, transforming the act of making into a meditation on presence, loss, and the enduring human need to be seen.
At a time when artificial intelligence and digital technologies can generate images instantly, contemporary artist Zhaleh Farhoumand’s process insists on the raw, imperfect presence of the human hand. The fingerprint, once a symbol of individuality, is now increasingly intertwined with systems of surveillance, technology, and identity, becoming the most human mark we have left. Through this intimate and unique touch, her work resists automation and uniformity, affirming our shared fragility and our enduring need to be seen.
