The photographer and wildlife rehabilitator explores migration, exile and healing in her show at the International Center of Photography, New York
Panjereh is the Farsi word for ‘window’, ‘portal’ or ‘passageway’. It’s also the title of Sheida Soleimani’s first New York institutional solo show, currently on view at the International Center of Photography. The exhibition, which will travel to the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati in October, houses some of the Iranian-American artist’s most personal and ambitious work to date, including her notable ‘Ghostwriter’ (2021–ongoing) series.
‘I have wanted to make photographs about my family’s story, and about my parents, since my undergraduate days,’ Soleimani tells me. ‘With “Ghostwriter”, I feel like I finally found the language, the ability and the confidence needed to do this properly.’
The 35-year-old has made a name for herself with her signature style, which updates the Dadaist photomontage for our digital age. In her home studio in Providence, she photographs dense tableaux that burst with a dizzying surfeit of reference and meaning, combining fragments of photographs sourced online with crude handcrafted photo-sculptures, found objects, precious heirlooms and, sometimes, people. Using a medium-format camera and a small aperture setting to ensure that the different components all appear in equally sharp focus, Soleimani compresses the space-time of this lively constellation into a two-dimensional image that is simultaneously seductive and grotesque. Over the past decade, she has used this methodology to address different, but always political, subject matters – from a memorialization of victims of the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses (‘To Oblivion’, 2016–17) to a campy send-up of the global oil industry’s power players (‘Medium of Exchange’, 2017–18).
‘Ghostwriter’ marks an evolution for the artist. The series focuses on family history – specifically, her parents’ political exile from Iran. Her father and mother, a doctor and nurse respectively, were pro-democracy activists critical of both the Shah and the Ayatollah, and they faced persecution following the 1979 revolution. He spent three years in hiding before fleeing the country in 1984. She was imprisoned and put in solitary confinement before she could leave and join her husband two years later. They eventually settled near Cincinnati, where Soleimani grew up. As the project’s title suggests, Soleimani adapts her unique visual language to illustrate key episodes from her parents’ lives on their behalf.
‘It was important that this work was collaborative,’ she explains, ‘that it did not fetishize their trauma but, instead, recorded their harrowing stories so they would have a permanent place in history. The series is a kind of survivor testimony.’ The ‘ghost’ in the title refers to both the author and her subjects; her spellbinding images reverse the traumatic limbo of her parents’ exile by remembering their pasts as both myth and history.
Soleimani describes her approach as ‘magical realism’. Akin to the literary genre, distinctions between figure and ground, image and object, time and place, fantasy and reality, history and myth, archive and memory, are all scrambled in images redolent with symbolism. Familiar photographic genres – the studio portrait, the ethnographic diorama, the still life – are infused with affect, humour and play. Deliverance (2024), Soleimani’s illustration of her father’s treacherous escape on horseback over the Zagros Mountains into Turkey, is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the tradition of heroic equestrian portraits. In it he appears astride a fibreglass horse upholstered in a chequerboard fabric screen-printed by hand, the pattern being a core motif in this series.
‘When my parents each fled – at different times – they were, in essence, forced to play a game: a game of luck and chance. My fascination with gameboards – checkers, Snakes and Ladders – emerges from this,’ Soleimani notes. ‘What are the games of risk that refugees and immigrants must play to survive? Can they climb the ladder, or will the snake bring them crashing back down?’
Soleimani sometimes uses this pattern, which also recalls Photoshop’s transparency grid, to loosely structure her photo-montaged backdrops; at other times, she approximates it by affixing squares of coloured paper to the surfaces of those backdrops. The pixelation of the low-resolution photographs she often uses to construct these backgrounds appears to spread virally, further compromising their legibility. ‘The fractured gameboard becomes the visual and conceptual backdrop to these narratives, laying the foundation for how layered, uncertain and deeply complicated these stories truly are,’ she explains.
If Deliverance marks departure, Behest Zahra (2023) imagines an unlikely return. The work shows her father seated cross-legged, cupping dirt in his hands, on a red Persian carpet within a makeshift – but effective – re-creation of the section of the titular cemetery (Behesht-e Zahra). Many murdered dissidents are buried there, their graves desecrated by the regime in order to erase these activists from history. One of the first things Soleimani’s parents purchased as a married couple, the carpet is a treasured keepsake her father carried with him into exile.
Though her parents appear in many of the photographs on view, we never see their faces. They either wear crude paper masks or turn away from the camera. While preserving their anonymity and deflecting the camera’s inquisitive and objectifying gaze, this strategy also focuses our attention on their body language and gestures. Soleimani emphasizes this in a series of smaller compositions that zoom in on her parents’ arms or hands. Across ‘Ghostwriter’, the gesturing hand becomes an index of care, a trace of lingering trauma, an expression of longing and a carrier of memory. In Behest Zahra, her father’s cupped hands encompass his grief – both for his martyred comrades and for a lost homeland.
Birds, dead and alive, also appear frequently in this series: a spillover – long resisted – from Soleimani’s parallel practice as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator. ‘I wanted to protect my patients,’ she says of the avians. ‘I didn’t want them to suffer the projection that so often accompanies photography or be subject to the perceptions humans have of them, to the symbols and roles they assign to them. Consider all the ideas – purity, hope, peace, misfortune, death – we have attached to these creatures for centuries in art, literature and film, all based on how they look, the sounds they make. I want these creatures to be free from those confines and to create their own narratives.’
Many of the birds that Soleimani cares for at her clinic Congress of the Birds are harmed by human infrastructure during their annual migrations. The live ones that appear in ‘Ghostwriter’ have often just recovered from such injuries and there is both an intimacy and an idiosyncrasy in how Soleimani chooses to portray them. In Noon-o-namak (2021) and Khooroos named Manoocher (2021), her parents – posed formally, seated in three-quarter profile – unexpectedly, tenderly, each cradle a different bird in their arms.
‘My relationship with my mother – who was unable to continue her profession in exile and redirected her caregiving instincts towards birds and animals – has always involved the caretaking of wild animals, trying to heal them and returning them back to the wild,’ the artist recounts. ‘When I began conceiving this series, I started thinking about lineages of care, about caretaking as inheritance.’ Rather than clichéd associations with flight and freedom, the birds embody the real risks, physical and psychological, that migrants, be they human or more-than-human, face and overcome. They appear not as metaphor but, perhaps, a type of kin; their presence, like that of her parents, testifies to their survival.
To these referentially rich images, Soleimani adds a more restrained register, nesting extreme close-ups of injured birds in her care in photographs her mother shot in Iran before she left (on film that was only recently developed). Taken with a close-up kit, these images force an extreme proximity to their distressed subjects that can make them hard to see, both visually and viscerally. In the subdued palette and inchoate forms of her mother’s photographs, any promise of an archival retrieval of the past softens into subjective impressions of colour, light and texture, acknowledging the inevitable fallibility of memory. Details from sketches made by her mother are overlaid: squares and rectangles, windows and doors, some barred and some slightly ajar. Soleimani’s frames and apertures are metaphors, too, asserting photography’s potential as a tool of critical fabulation – a portal through which to bridge past and present, story and history.
