RILKE and ME
“One should think of poetry as something that is not about objects but rather themselves, a poem that can raise its objects and fill the space with them.” — RILKE
My journey as an artist began with literature. I embarked upon this path as a self-taught seeker of artistic vision in Iran in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war. I began this journey by re-reading the ancient poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This guided my search into fundamental queries on life and death, our origins, purpose, and destiny. During this period in the late 1980s, there was a resurgence of previously banned works. Novels from renowned authors like Bohumil Hrabal, José Saramago, V.S. Naipaul, Mikhail Bulgakov, Virginia Woolf, Haruki Murakami, and Irvin Yalom, to name a few, were translated and published and came flooding into my life. Amidst this torrent of literary treasures, one particular work emerged that would come to be central to my artistic vision: Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. This work offered itself as a companion in my search for artistic truth. Its rich use of metaphor and its lyrical prose fueled my imagination and inspired me to go deeper into my craft. Rilke helped me confront my existential dilemmas and contemplate the mysteries and tragedies of existence.
Minoo Emami is an Iranian multidisciplinary artist with over 20 years dedicated to art practice, teaching, and exhibition. She was a self-thought painter when she moved to the U.S. and began her formal art education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in January 2015. She earned a BFA from Tufts University in May 2019. Minoo received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in May 2021.
