NO NIIN Magazine
NO NIIN is an online magazine at the Cusp of art, criticality and love. NO NIIN absorbs the disruptive sparks emerging from the intersectional art and culture environs that counter the status quo, aspiring to develop them as springboards for new ways of thinking and working towards hope, liberation, and building transnational, feminist and anti-imperialist solidarities.
Co-founded and co-edited by Elham Rahmati and Vidha Saumya in 2021, NO NIIN is an independent online monthly magazine at the cusp of art, criticality, and love. Working with over 400 writers, artists, curators, and researchers as of October 2024, NO NIIN has published 27 online issues and 3 print volumes.
We want NO NIIN to be a critical locus for discourse and provoke difficult conversations—to call for more imaginative and unorthodox approaches to talk back to institutions, explain, defend, complain, and even complicate the picture. We wish to foster a non-discriminatory culture of communication in the arts, breaking down our facts into simple language and ideas that people can comprehend without struggling over syntax. We want to reformulate international ambitions by including and promoting a wide variety of voices and practices, particularly in locations that are often overlooked because they are not considered globally as the usual hubs of contemporary art. More than “giving a voice,” we’ve made an effort to open a space for a way of living art in the contemporary world. NO NIIN is not a publication of/for victims or a benevolent patronizing gesture of making something weak and powerless visible. We want NO NIIN to be triumphant and realistic and speak of the world as we know and feel it.
NO NIIN functions as a platform for commissioning writers of any background to express their thoughts in the form of essays, reviews, interviews, research papers, artworks, poetry and short fiction. In 2021, we embarked on publishing monthly issues of the magazine. We built a solid infrastructure by creating a transparent and equitable work system. We wrote contracts and a conflict resolution mechanism and made information about NO NIIN’s finances and values available on the website. In addition to the monthly online issues, the magazine publishes annual anthology-format print publications with editors’ picks of contributions from the online issues.
NO NIIN is supported by the Kone Foundation (2021, 2024)