Elham Rahmati (b. 1989, Tehran) is a visual artist based between Helsinki and Tehran. She is the co-founder and co-editor of NO NIIN, an independent online monthly magazine at the cusp of art, criticality, and love. She has worked as the curator and producer of the Academy of Moving People & Images (AMPI), an independent film school in Helsinki, and as a curator at Third Space. 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.
To Run Deep Down Somewhere is a playlist I put together with 40 of my all-time favourite love songs. I made the playlist in 2019. I had turned 30 that year, so naturally, I was going through this unnecessary dramatic emotional phase where I imagined myself as the cynical heroine of a 60’s French New Wave film.
An independent, subversive, spontaneous and romantic woman shrouded in an aura of mystery who gets her male counterparts into trouble. Call it a defence mechanism in coping with the crushing pressures of being excessively exerted at a demanding job and being bored to death in my personal life.
Anyway, while going through that phase, I made myself this playlist to complement the image of the woman described above. To keep the playlist coherent with the amusing lives of such women, I held a narrative in mind while putting the songs in order. You start with longing for someone you don’t even know but you are certain they are coming along, as Kajol does at the beginning of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge1 (I’m going to use this film for reference a lot, at least until I make sure anyone who reads my ramblings has watched it. I mean who needs Anna Karina when you have Kajol). Then you meet them and fall madly in love, love at first one-night stand. This is an exciting stage so it lasts for a while (from Holding a Monument to Senza un Perché), meanwhile, you get to know one another, discover each others’ quirks and eccentricities and adoring them because of it, cute, right? Well, it’s nice while it lasts but then we move on to the next stage where a conflict inevitably arises. It could be physical distance or having grown emotionally apart, could be a third party, could be jealousy or murder, could be that like David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence2 you are two men falling for one another, one being a British prisoner of war in World War II and the other a Japanese honour-bound captain who runs the prison camp. As you can imagine, their story like most of my other imaginary romantic scenarios does not end happily ever after; it ends with the haunting image of Capt. Yanoi cutting a lock of Jack Celliers’s golden hair and bowing to him while he is buried in the sand up to his neck and left to die. And this is where my playlist ends. I warned you, it was a dramatic year!
PS: Each playlist I have is a timestamp to a certain time in my life. Creating playlists, sharing them and writing or talking about them is something I find a lot of joy in. So share your playlists with us at NO NIIN, write something about them, anything, we will be happy to publish them.
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READIn August 2021 Mourning School (Rosa Paardenkooper, Lucie Gottlieb), a long-term curatorial study program based in Stockholm and Dear, (Martha Jager) an Amsterdam-based artist initiative, gathered on Vifarnaholme, an island in Lake Malaren, near the city centre of Stockholm. During their week-long residency there they worked collaboratively on a series of five letters written or otherwise composed by invited artists, authors and poets. This audio essay is built up with hyperlinks that direct readers & listeners to different parts of the mix that connect to the respective words/phrases. The endnotes to the essay form a tracklist.
Dear, don’t forget to bring a carton of milk on your way home x
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READBut what if I am comfortable in my own space? What if I don’t want to defy the impossible and all I want is to achieve my goals peacefully? Why should I compete fiercely with others to achieve my aims?
Ordinary Life
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READPublishing creative works-in-progress is something we should be doing more of. Floating in a space of incompleteness, in-the-making-ness, and reckoning with each other is something we should be doing more of. And if anything, questing for certainty and completion in our industry is compromising our art on a collective level.
In defense of works-in-progress
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READMusic videos typically are used to entertain the public, but the effects of music videos can be much more far-reaching than just entertainment. They originally served the purpose of creating an outlet where artists could generate publicity for their work, broaden their popular appeal, and reach wider audiences with interesting audio-visual content. Over the years, the visual imagery in music videos has increasingly become as significant as the music itself.
Pehmee’s Watchlist: Breaking Stereotypes, One Music Video at a Time