Elham is a visual artist and the co-founder/co-editor of NO NIIN Magazine. Based between Tehran and Helsinki, her practice engages with the politics of memory, recognizing it as constantly evolving and never fixed. Through revisiting memories that endure in stories, gestures, and family rituals, rather than in official preservation, she creates spaces for interpretation and reconstruction of the past.
Elham Rahmati
Elham’s practice is motivated by finding new ways of thinking and working towards hope, liberation, and building internationalist, feminist, and anti-imperialist solidarities.
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).
Under the Pretense of Hope (2024–ongoing)
Elham Rahmati turns away from the spectacle of protest to attend to the gestures that sustain it. Rather than depicting moments of confrontation, her drawings preserve acts of tenderness, a cigarette offered to ease the sting of tear gas, a stranger opening their home, bodies held after fear, people resting together in the aftermath. Through these encounters, Rahmati reminds us that resistance is not only enacted through defiance, but through care, connection, and the relationships that make collective struggle possible. For the artist, hope is not optimism but a discipline, a choice to continue despite uncertainty. Each drawing becomes an act of remembering, carrying forward the conviction that even amid violence and defeat, the memory of being cared for endures, returning to nourish future movements for liberation.
This artwork spotlight is part of عزیزم، دنیا گلستون میشه یک روز / ‘My dear, one day the world will bloom into a garden’, conceived by Yalda Bidshahri for the ROSVÂ Summer 2026 Guest Curator Residency.