For the first time, Soleimani turns her camera inwards to explore her family’s history of exile from Iran and the transference of the notion of home. The series of tableaux images ‘ghostwrite’ her parents’ life tracing their time living in Iran as pro-democracy activists and the conditions that led to their displacement to the United States
Casting her parents, mâmân and bâbâ, as protagonists, two portraits symbolically recount the memories surrounding Soleimani’s mother’s home and the unfolding of their urgent departure as Iran’s regime tightened its response to dissent. Evocative of how these recollections were passed down to Soleimani as a child at home, each figure sits in a ruptured domestic setting composed from layered images. Their faces are shielded by paper masks made necessary due to their enduring fears of persecution.
In this patchwork of perspectives, as if echoing the volatility and incoherence of memory, patterning inspired by an ancient Persian game of Snakes and Ladders is discernible. Tiles overlap photographs that capture remnants of her mother’s family home in Shiraz and drawings she made to translate her harrowing experiences. The game board iconography resonates across Soleimani’s images alluding to the chance, risk and reward involved in the process of her parents’ journey.
Soleimani is also a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, developing the skill of caregiving passed down to her by her mother. The appearance of birds, in particular, is both a gesture towards family history and metaphor within the work’s larger narrative. As custodian of her parents’ stories, Ghostwriter begins a retrieval and creation of the artist’s family lore. While specific and personal, the work, in its collapse of space and time, speaks to the wider phenomenon of migration and the enduring effects of Iran’s regime.
Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani makes work that excavates the histories of violence linking Iran, the United States, and the Greater Middle East. In working across form and medium—especially photography, sculpture, collage, and film—she often appropriates source images from popular/digital media and resituates them within defamiliarizing tableaux. The composition depends on the question at hand. For example, how can one do justice to survivor testimony and to the survivors themselves (To Oblivion)? What are the connections between oil, corruption, and human rights abuses among OPEC nations (Medium of Exchange)? How do nations work out reparations deals that often turn the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests (Reparations Packages)? How may the layering of memory and familial history both report fact, and produce a reckoning with the intimate resonances of a geopolitics of violence (Ghostwriter)? In contrast to Western news, which rarely covers these problems, Soleimani makes work that persuades spectators to address them directly and effectively. Soleimani’s work is held in permanent collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, MIT List Visual Art Center, and Kadist Paris. Her work has been recognized internationally in both exhibitions and publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, Interview Magazine, amount many others. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is also an assistant professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator.
