If the personal becomes political in Ledare’s and Engman’s work, the political becomes personal in “Ghostwriter,” an ongoing series Sheida Soleimani began in 2020. The 34-year-old’s parents immigrated from Iran to rural Ohio in 1984, fleeing political persecution. Soleimani’s father is a physician and pro-democracy activist, her mother, a nurse and fellow traveler.
Both fled their homeland in dramatic journeys that Soleimani grew up hearing about on the other side of the world. 'JD Vance grew up 20 minutes from where we were,' she says, underscoring the contrast. Her parents didn’t speak English well, so she was the only audience for the stories of their lives back home, and the traumas they carried: solitary confinement, perilous escapes over snowy mountains, friends put to death. 'They don’t believe in therapy, of course, even though they’re medical professionals,' she says. 'I was exposed to some pretty insane shit at a young age.'
Soleimani first resisted telling her family’s story in her work, though she was unafraid of politics: she originally drew attention for her dense collages, which she creates in her studio and stages for the camera, as well as her effigies of women wrongfully executed by the Iranian government. Her visually exuberant “Medium of Exchange” (2016–18) series has a burlesque quality, combining dense archival materials with live models, sometimes nude and often wearing the masks of political figures like Kissinger, Rumsfeld, and Cheney, sometimes slicked with black oil.
The pandemic, however, pushed her to think more about the stories she grew up hearing. She was convinced that her mother would get Covid from her father, who works in a hospital, and that they, and their stories, might be lost. So she called up her parents and proposed a series, and they agreed, on certain conditions. Their faces must be covered, since her father is still politically active under a pseudonym. And the project must be collaborative. Soleimani became their “ghostwriter,” telling stories that belong to her parents, but in her own language. The title of the series has another valence too: Soleimani is making visible ghosts from her parents’ past, specters that have haunted her life as much as theirs.
She introduces her parents in two portraits, Noon-o-namak (bread and salt), 2021, and Khooroos (rooster) named Manoocher, 2021. They sit in three-quarter profile, before a busy backdrop of photographs, tiled like a checkerboard, that show the ruins of their home in Shiraz, Iran, where many of their stories take place. In both, they wear masks and clutch a bird in one arm. Her mother holds a guinea hen, a species that she had rehabilitated in Shiraz; her father holds a rooster, an allusion to a bird that used to live on their property, where he killed many snakes.
Many of Soleimani’s pictures show birds, which constitute a language of symbols her parents gifted her. As a nurse, Soleimani’s mother focused on rehabilitating birds when she moved to America and could not practice because of her ropy English. The artist herself is a licensed bird rehabilitator; her interview for this piece took place in the aviary for her crows. Her brood sometimes interrupted her speech. ('The Ravens speak Farsi and they imitate my voice,' she said. 'They’re saying Salaam.')
In Khoy (2021), named for the prison where her mother was held in solitary confinement for more than a year, her mother’s hand sticks out from paper bars, holding an Eastern bluebird that Soleimani rehabilitated and then released with her mother. Soleimani constructs her images as sets, with costumed characters posed among printed-out images and sculptures: in a trompe l’oeil that evokes the forced juxtapositions both of historical processes and artistic practice, Soleimani re-creates realities as complicated, and chaotic, as collage. Here, the bars are made from a cut-up printed image of the actual entrance to the Khoy prison, where her mother was sent for her activism; screen printed in the upper left corner is a Farsi poem in which Soleimani’s mother compares herself to a bird in a cage that no one listens to.
So much in these images is private. The Farsi text is illegible to most viewers, and even those who can read the language would not know the real meaning of the poems. Many images feature Soleimani’s mother’s eerie drawings from her past (a face drawn on a quince, a glyphic fetus on a board). And of course, Soleimani’s parents keep their faces covered.
Working with her parents required the artist to “build a consensual practice.” Photography is always an act of domination. 'The lens is a dick that penetrates the world nonconsensually,' the artist likes to tell her students. Dada collage, whose cutting, splicing, gluing, and superimposing fascinates Soleimani, is similarly haunted by violence. Photography, like family, is stalked by questions of power, of ownership, of autonomy. Photographing one’s parents brings out these familiar, yet still fundamental, ethical quandaries. That is in part because every viewer intuitively understands what is at stake when you see your mom naked. But it is also because, here, we can clearly grasp how photography works in two directions at once.
The artists here have taken their parents’ pictures, yes, but given them something in return too. Ledare gave his mother, Tina, access to the airy realms of high art that she briefly inhabited as a young dancer, but from which motherhood took her away. Engman has rendered Kathleen something of a viral icon; as standards of beauty and inclusivity change, she is in demand as a model.
And Soleimani has externalized and shared stories that her parents have carried within themselves, “ghostwriting” narratives that they did not have the language, or the freedom, to tell.
