Women's Forum

Charisma determines the success of a singer. In the case of Ulviyya Rahimova you feel her power over the audience as soon as she appears on stage.  Together with her musicians, Ulviyya transports us from her usual venue at the Jazz Center to another place. This is a place where the power of public opinion weakens and Baku imbibes the spirit of a city which belongs to free-thinking and open-minded people.

Baku is an amazing place where a person like Rena Effendi can live and create relatively undisturbed by the forces of a consumerist society. This combined with her easy-going personality make it easy to seek her out. The photographs and the controversy surrounding Rena’s work will pique anyone’s curiosity. When somebody pointed her out to me at a party I did not hesitate to ask for an interview.

There are roughly 40 different records on Nargiz Nasrullayeva-Muduroglu on google. About 37 of them are connected to her work as the Executive Director of the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Azerbaijan. There are few people in Baku, however, that actually need to do a search on her name. But Nargiz is not only the center of a social universe, concentrated in the Landmark, a business complex and hotel run by her husband Eran.

The first thing I say about Azerbaijan when asked is that it is a country full of contradictions: the wealth of the city and the poverty of the regions, beautiful facades and ugly abandoned construction sites, a people’s subordination to custom and an individual’s fight for justice. I meet Sabina Shikhlinskaya as she emerges from the midst of such a fight. She is agitated, outraged, determined, fearless.