Sheida Soleimani on Creating Political Poetry Through Images

SS: I get a lot of animals dropped off here—people in Providence know where I live, so if they find a bird, they’ll often just leave it at my door without saying anything. I’ve opened my front door to boxes of chickens, parakeets, finches, you name it.

Last year, someone left two parakeets stuffed in a bag that said “Happy Bday”. I got a little attached, so they stayed, and are named Happy and Bday. I also live with two ravens, two crows, and a blue jay who are all educational ambassadors for Congress of the Birds. They’re non-releasable and help us teach the public about wild bird care and conservation. Alongside them are about 20 chickens, eight ducks, and four guinea fowl.

SS: I’m really lucky to be so close with my parents; storytelling has always been central to our relationship and how we communicate. As a fellow Iranian, I think you’ll understand how deeply ingrained that is culturally. But growing up in the Midwest, I noticed how Americans often expect stories to be direct, especially when they’re trying to access unfamiliar experiences. There’s this urge to frame things through trauma, to hear what’s good or bad, right or wrong, without much room for nuance.

In school, when I’d say something like, “My mom was in prison,” there was no framework for others to understand what a political prisoner was. In Ohio, being in prison meant drugs, theft, or murder—there was no room for the political, for the complex. So storytelling became my way of building bridges. Show-and-tell would turn into me explaining the Iranian Revolution. My parents, both activists, were always telling me their own histories: my mom working in a leper asylum or treating Kurdish victims of Iranian attacks; my dad witnessing his friends being hanged. These weren’t exceptional stories in our community—they were part of how we lived, part of how we survived. That’s what drives “Ghostwriter”.

I’m drawn to magical realism as a way of resisting this Western demand for clarity. In [Gabriel Garcia] Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example, time folds in on itself—characters live across centuries, or maybe they’re ghosts. That ambiguity is political. It destabilizes the reader. I want my work to do the same: to challenge viewers to engage differently, to resist simple readings, and to reassemble fragmented narratives on their own terms.

SS: I really appreciate that you were able to read the poem. So many American viewers have said, “I can’t access this work because it’s not in English. Do you have a translation?” And sure, I can give a rough translation—but so much is lost. Farsi holds layers of meaning; even something as simple as the word for asparagus, marchoobeh, literally means “little snake stick.” That kind of nuance doesn’t carry over.

That complexity also ties into the show’s title. The word panjareh holds so many meanings for me. I started thinking more seriously about windows during the first Trump era—about borders, about what we can and can’t access, about being held in or out. At the same time, I was thinking about the window in my mother’s solitary confinement cell. She drew it constantly, from memory, over and over. Even at restaurants, when they’d give me crayons and table paper as a kid to draw with, she’d take them and draw that window. It was situated far above her head, letting in a sliver of light from left to right. She’d warm her hands in the sunlight on the wall. It was her only access to the outside world. That window was never just a window—it was a boundary, a portal, a torture device. It offered a glimpse of freedom while enforcing her captivity.

That layered meaning of “window” extends into my wildlife rehab work. Window strikes are the number one cause of wild bird death, aside from outdoor cats. Migratory birds—some flying from South America to New England—navigate by starlight. City lights scramble their stellar cues, drawing them down where they can’t distinguish glass. Because birds are tetrachromats, they see far more than we do, but untreated windows are invisible to them. These clear, beautiful windows we love become deadly traps.

So for me, “Panjareh” isn’t just about a view or a portal. It’s about violence disguised as transparency. It’s about how even something that feels full of hope can be a mechanism of harm.

SS: At ICP, I was thinking a lot about how to break up the space—the hallway and the main room—and how to differentiate them. It reminded me of the two spaces my parents moved between: the home and the hospital. That duality exists in my life too. My home holds the personal, the artistic. The wildlife clinic holds the care work. I wanted the exhibition to reflect that split.

I’ve been increasingly drawn to building environments in exhibitions. For me, each photograph functions like a screenplay. There’s a sense of staging: who’s the protagonist, the antagonist? Where’s the light coming from? Who’s entering from where? I can’t stand exhibitions that are just pieces on a wall. People always say I’m a maximalist, but it’s not just about excess, it’s about context. A strong work should stand alone, yes, but I also want to resist this need for clean timelines or didactic histories. That’s where the drawings come in. They’re my way of creating a timeline through gesture and through space, not through dates. The house my mother lived in is gone, but its imprint remains. The hospital she worked in no longer stands, but its bones are still there. These drawings hold the past, present, and future at once. Like oral histories, they’re a form of visual storytelling.

SS: The death drive is real—historically, in art, and in life. For my parents, as immigrants who survived so much, there was a pressure to build something from the wreckage. But they never allowed themselves to grieve. When they told me their stories, it wasn’t about passing on grief, it was about passing on reality. Grief, in that context, felt like a luxury. It’s something you only get to do when you have time, when survival isn’t the priority.

I remember starting to teach in 2015, when I was 25, and hearing my students talk about self-care. At first, I dismissed it—like, what are these soft kids talking about? But then I realized I’d internalized this hardness. My father would say, “Why would I grieve? Life keeps moving.” That urgency becomes a way of life. There’s a line in the show: موجیم که آسودگی ما عدم ماست (“We are the wave that ceases to exist even when we reach the shore”). Rest becomes a kind of death, a letting go that’s too dangerous to allow.

My mom still talks about everything she went through, but she hasn’t grieved it. It’s always present-tense. That’s what trauma does—it collapses time. For me, I don’t carry their grief the same way. I’m a witness, a vessel. It’s not traumatizing because it’s so deeply embedded. It’s just life.

That’s why I build the work the way I do. These are layered, complex realities. The installations, the props, the characters, the sculptural components, are meant to resist the flattening that photography can so easily do. Grief, memory, and survival are not linear. They collide and live in the same space.

SS: He lives one door down! When I started teaching, I had no idea how messed up academia really was. My first job was as a diversity fellow at RISD, and while I’d been a student in academia, I was more blissfully unaware back then. Once I was on the other side, I saw how students were organizing—mobilizing against institutional harm—and it reminded me of my Baba, who always said students were the ones leading the charge, part of the intelligentsia pushing for change from within.

But it also made me think about who gets left out—who doesn’t have access to these spaces or conversations. I noticed this urgency from students, believing that protest should lead to immediate change. But real political change is slow. It made me rethink what protest even looks like. It’s not just marching in the streets—though that matters. It’s also care work, storytelling, and collaboration.

For me, activism includes listening, holding space, telling the stories of those who’ve been silenced. Change doesn’t come from one person, it comes from collective action and care. That’s at the heart of my practice: building relationships, sustaining resistance, and expanding the idea of what protest can be.

SS: I think there’s so much of this. We’re always trying to tether narratives—to time, to place, to something fixed—but they rarely stay that way. Like there’s this little pot: it moves from one space to another, and in doing so, its identity shifts. Does it become something new in a different country? Does it need a new purpose?

That ties back to sculpture for me. When does something become sculpture? Is it when it stops being functional? Or when the thought behind it begins to function differently? I’m interested in those thresholds—objects that carry layered meanings and evolve as they move. The same goes for storytelling. Communication is often fractured and nonlinear. Stories shift depending on who tells them, when, and where. They’re unstable, full of interference, and constantly transforming.

SS: I made those pieces just two weeks before the exhibition. It all started when the museum director saw my bird photographs while I was showing work in Italy. They were just the close-up shots of the birds, no backdrops or drawings. I loved the photos, but felt they weren’t enough, not layered or contextualized. Elisabeth Sherman, the curator I began working with, encouraged me to include them anyway, saying the photos were complicated and I should give myself more credit.

Still, I felt the images weren’t quite finished—they lacked context and story. The birds weren’t placed anywhere. Most had been maimed by window strikes. At the same time, I was cataloging blurry negatives from my mom’s very first roll of film, mostly shots of the sky. I decided to place the birds back into the sky using screenprints of sky crops beneath the photos. But even that felt too simple, too linear, like the birds were dead and just pasted back where they belonged.

One week before the show, I asked the screen printer if he could print some of my mom’s drawings on top of the bird prints. Thankfully, he agreed to give it a shot. When I saw them layered together, I knew this was what I needed: a kind of codex where the images and drawings speak to each other but aren’t immediately clear. These drawings echoed those on the walls, creating a larger family. I was nervous—they felt so incredibly different from my usual work. But once on the wall, the language aligned perfectly, and they made sense with my in-studio tableaus.

SS: They’re tiny, but absolutely beautiful. What you said really hits home—these are seeds that don’t naturally thrive here, but they still grow. That’s what being part of a diaspora feels like: being uprooted, forced from home, yet finding ways to survive and adapt. These plants have become a mirror for her, a coping mechanism. They weren’t meant to leave their original home, but someone brought them here, lovingly cared for them, yet it’s still not the same. It’s never really home.

There’s this ongoing effort to recreate home—something she’s always done, and something I’ve tried to do too, even though it was never truly mine. I started growing plants, adopting her rituals. She told me about pinning insects to the walls of her mud house, creating a bug collection she’d draw. In my first college apartment in Ohio, I did the same, pinning bugs to the wall, trying to recreate that space.
These stories and practices travel across borders—illogical, shifting borders—and try to unfurl elsewhere, even if those spaces aren’t quite right or hospitable. They become new forms of choreography, new ways of making space. Building these spaces, negotiating what’s real and what’s recreated, is something I’m deeply fascinated by.