Sheida Soleimani: What A Revolutionary Must Know
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnacti, Ohio, USA
Sheida Soleimani’s solo exhibition brings together her full “Ghostwriter” series—visually arresting photographs, sculpture, and video that piece together the remarkable journey of her parents' escape from Iran’s totalitarian regime. Through constructed sets and surreal visual metaphors, Soleimani reconstructs their fractured history into works of resistance and reckoning. This deeply personal series presents a family’s survival story as a larger meditation on identity, memory, and political trauma. This marks the first time the artist is presenting video work in a museum context.
Soleimani, raised in Cincinnati’s Loveland neighborhood, is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist whose multimedia work excavates histories of political violence connecting Iran, the United States, and the broader Middle East. Born to parents who fled Iran as political refugees in the early 1980s, Soleimani transforms source images from mass and digital media into striking photo-based installations, often staged in surreal, symbolic environments.
Her practice spans photography, sculpture, collage, and film, offering viewers layered critiques of authoritarianism, exile, and diaspora.
Soleimani’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts
Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and Kadist Paris, among others. Her projects have been widely covered by outlets including The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, and Interview Magazine.
Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is an associate professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University. She is also the founder and executive director of Congress of the Birds, and the only federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator in the state. For Wave Pool’s 9th “Welcome Edition”, she created a powerful public artwork of 100 cast aluminum tulips—each one honoring a protestor killed in Iran following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in Tehran, Iran. The tulips debuted at the 2023 Armory Show and have since raised funds for both CAC and Wave Pool and are available for purchase at CAC’s gift shop.
The presentation of Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know at CAC is supported by Kate Bonansinga, Denise Burge, Barbara K. Myers, Morgan + Eddie Rigaud, and Sara + Michelle Vance Waddell.
