Sheida Soleimani

Sheida Soleimani is an Iranian-American artist whose interdisciplinary work fuses photography, sculpture, and political commentary. Drawing from her background in activism and her family’s history of political exile, she stages intricate tableaux that critique state violence, human rights abuses, and Western complicity. Her vivid visual language confronts systems of power through symbolic fragmentation and satire. Sheida uses photography and constructed sets to examine the politics of image-making, drawing attention to the ways media representations manipulate and distort Middle Eastern narratives. Her work reconfigures historical timelines, staging events out of sequence to disrupt Western chronologies and assert alternative, often silenced, truths about Iranian identity, diaspora, and political violence.

Sheida Soleimani’s Ghostwriter is a fierce and unflinching excavation of personal and political trauma, one that navigates the impossible task of translating testimony into image, and silence into form. The series is based on interviews Soleimani conducted with her mother, a former political prisoner who was persecuted in Iran during the 1979 revolution. Using handmade sets, archival imagery, and props that reference torture, migration, and resistance, Soleimani builds elaborate visual collages that feel both staged and urgently real. Soleimani raises questions about who gets to narrate history, who bears its consequences, and how intergenerational memory functions when the archive is oral, broken, or suppressed. There is no resolution in Ghostwriter, no redemptive ending, but there is power in the act of re-telling.