Three Questions for Anahita Razmi

In her work, German-Iranian artist Anahita Razmi addresses questions of representation, cultural coding, and media-based displacement. Using strategies of appropriation and contextual reordering, she investigates how meaning circulates between images, languages, and political spaces. CURRENT spoke with her about multilingualism, “hot air,” and the potential of unintelligibility.

CURRENT: In your work POLYPHONIC HOT AIR, you explore how the idiom "hot air" manifests differently across languages and cultures. What drew you to this expression, and in what way does "hot air" exemplify shifts in meaning shaped by context, communication, and power?

Anahita Razmi: What interests me about the expression “hot air” is above all its ambivalence. On one hand, it stands for emptiness, for something meaningless—mere talk, rhetorical excess, perhaps even deception. At the same time, taken literally, it’s an image of energy, movement, ascent. In different languages and cultural contexts, it functions differently: sometimes as an everyday metaphor, sometimes as a political judgment, sometimes as a poetic image, sometimes only in the literal sense.

The judgment of what counts as "hot air," as meaningless, is never neutral. Language is always tied to power—what is dismissed as “empty words” strongly depends on who is speaking, where the speaking happens, and who understands or doesn’t understand and evaluates what’s being said.

In the sense of Édouard Glissant’s right to “opacity,” I’m also interested in the right to be unintelligible. When is unintelligibility dismissed as meaningless—and when is it even perceived as threatening? In a multilingual, diasporic context like Stuttgart, the question of “hot air” is always also a question of visibility, translatability, and recognition.

CURRENT: The work takes place both as a poster in public space and through performances. How do meanings shift in the transition from image to action?

Anahita Razmi: The posters operate strongly on a visual and semiotic level—they play with repetition, fragmentation, and illegibility. “HOT AIR” appears in multiple languages. That may create a sense of overload, but also a sense of simultaneity and equivalence.

In performance, the relationship shifts from legibility to audibility, from text to voice. Language becomes embodied—through different people, through volume, breath, rhythm. It’s not only about what is said, but how it’s said, who speaks, for whom. The performance introduces aspects that are only implied in the poster: presence, fragility, disorientation. And it creates space for the kinds of friction or connection that might arise in linguistic confusion.

CURRENT: Your practice often unfolds at the intersection of installation, performance, and language. How does POLYPHONIC HOT AIR fit into your broader body of work?

Anahita Razmi: Many of my works deal with the tension between language, identity, and political visibility—often in a transcultural context between so-called “East” and “West” narratives. POLYPHONIC HOT AIR continues these explorations, but shifts the focus more toward collectivity and multilingualism. Many voices, many languages, different perspectives that coexist without necessarily having to be understandable to everyone.

So the work is both a continuation of my long-standing practice—because it brings together performance, language, and installation—and an attempt to further decentralize the idea of “meaning”: away from the individual and toward a more complex, and possibly contradictory, space.

Photo Credits
Anahita Razmi: Heiße Luft, 2025 © Anahita Razmi