Sheida Soleimani

Lives and works in Providence, RI, USA

Artist statement

In my photographic scenarios, I appropriate cultural symbols to create mash-ups that signify my position as an Iranian- American viewing the Middle East from an outside lens. By focusing on media trends and the dissemination of societal occurrences through the news, I choose to source imagery from popular media, as well as social media leaks, and adapt these images to exist within alternative scenarios. The breadth and topics of my work have always been interrelated, but have developed drastically within the past decade. In my newest series Ghostwriter, I invite viewers to attend to the violence and harm that bind individual lives to impersonal structures. In collaborating with my parents, I recast their life stories as autobiographical images that visceralize the process of becoming an abstraction: citizen, prisoner, fugitive, refugee, immigrant, other. In several photographs, my parents’ faces are hidden or turned away from the lens. More than four decades later, these masks are still necessary to protect them from being identified and targeted by their former homeland. They also suggest much more, for even as screens can offer protection, they are also objects upon which others project images, memories, and fantasies. Ghostwriter also reconstructs how people escape from the forces of violence, carry trauma, resist processes of abstraction, and develop coping mechanisms for survival, care, and even flourishing.Each assemblage breaks narrative storytelling into fragments,...

Artwork