Current Residents Elham Rahmati
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Elham Rahmati, Questions for My Aunts, film still, 2025
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NO NIIN Issue 21, Is the Land Yours if You Burn it, Edited by Elham Rahmati & Vidha Saumya, 2024
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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).
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.