Current Residents Elham Rahmati
-
Elham Rahmati, Questions for My Aunts, film still, 2025
-
NO NIIN Issue 21, Is the Land Yours if You Burn it, Edited by Elham Rahmati & Vidha Saumya, 2024
-
Elham Rahmati, Under the Pretense of Hope, Colored pencil on paper, 2024
Elham Rahmati is a visual artist and the founder and co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN, a magazine at the cusp of art, criticality and love. Elham’s practice explores the specificity of relations between identity, politics and culture with an emphasis on the politics of memory.
Elham holds an MA in Visual Arts from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze and an MA in Visual Culture, Curating & Contemporary Art from Aalto University. Her work has been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (2018), the Kone Foundation (2019–2024), and the Saastamoinen Foundation (2025).
Update: Elham’s residency, which was due to take place Spring 2026, has been delayed to 2027:
‘In June 2025, Israel launched a military attack on Iran with the active support of the United States. When the fighting stopped after twelve days, it was obvious to everyone that this was a pause, not an end – and that the next round would not resolve itself quickly. I knew I was not going to spend that war watching from a distance, worrying. I wanted to be with my people on my own land.
I left Helsinki for Tehran in November 2025. I had a residency at HIAP planned for April, and technically I can still leave and return to Finland. I’ve chosen not to – not until the U.S./Israeli war of aggression on Iran has ended, with the aggressors having failed on every front. That I know is coming.
I miss Helsinki and all my friends and I hope to be back soon.’ – Elham Rahmati.
During the residency, I advance several interconnected projects. As co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN Magazine, we continue publishing new issues committed to hope, liberation, and internationalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist solidarity. I also work on Under the Pretense of Hope, a drawing series exploring alternative visual representations of people in protest. Additionally, I am conducting preliminary research for an upcoming video project that examines the personal stakes of familial political debates and investigates how modern Iranian identities are shaped by the internalization of colonial violence—how historical and structural oppression permeates intimate family dynamics, influencing beliefs, loyalties, and generational conflicts.