Sheida Soleimani speaks the language of birds, deftly contorting lips and breath, and chants lilting sounds with the unique fluency of birds. As far as the Iranian-American artist is concerned, it is her second language after Persian. “Before she could speak English, she would listen to birdsong on tape,” says Soleimani, 32. She spent hours in her bedroom during her early childhood recording bird calls, especially those of North America. “I didn’t really have any friends back then,” she added.
The daughter of Iranian political refugees, Soleimani has settled in Loveland, Ohio, in what she calls “a world of corn and soybeans.” She currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island and is the city’s only registered wild bird rehabilitator.when i visit In May, in her stucco-brick basement — newly transformed into a bustling wildlife clinic — she used the sounds of Baltimore orioles to soothe fluttering Quaker parrots in wood-and-mesh cages. I’m here. lime green bird, Its wings had been clipped and dropped on her doorstep. “Whoever clipped her wings did a hacking job,” she says. The rest of the room is filled with other birds she cares for, including a robin, a baby starling, a duckling, a mallard, and two owls (a crow and an owl). There’s even a badly emaciated bunny found in the park.
At the height of the bird season, which is the height of midsummer, a stranger may have left 20 or more birds a day on the porch of a black Victorian 19th-century cerulean house. there is. (“The highest number dropped off on any given day is 29,” she says.) She also runs a home studio, where she explores hyper-saturated colors and geopolitical chills. I create photo collages in a satirical way.
“I build things on top of each other. I obfuscate it and confuse it so that people spend their time deciphering or deconstructing the work,” Soleimani says. “There’s a lot of language and code that the viewer can’t see, but I don’t think it has to be.”
She spends much of her time here walking back and forth between her bird reception and feeding clinic and her studio in the garage behind her house. Her most recent project, the “Ghostwriter” series, Providence College Gallery“I aim to elucidate the relationship between the two most important caring practices of my life: my work as a wildlife rehabilitator and my work as an artist,” explains Soleimani.
In “Ghostwriter,” she turned the camera to her father and mother. It was her father and mother who first learned to rehabilitate birds. Also, her parents whose work defined her final years in Iran, defined by a startling series of political schisms, including the downfall of the king and the subsequent Iranian Revolution that changed the country in the late 1970s. This is the first time that I have directly addressed the personal history of .changed the couple’s destiny eternally.
The two first met in 1975 at a hospital in Shiraz. He was training to be a doctor and she was a nurse. They were also pro-democracy activists, co-founding field hospitals for guerrilla fighters and Kurdish rebels.because my father objected Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule brought, as Soleimani explains, “a bounty on his head”. endured imprisonment.
In “Noonamak (Bread and Salt)” (2021), In one of the central photographs of “Ghostwriter,” Soleimani’s mother poses for her daughter. Her long white hair is loosely braided and her face is hidden by a piece of paper cut by an artist and dangling over her ears. political refugee. In the background is a sort of patchwork of inkjet her prints, some depicting her mother’s childhood mud brick house, and a screen painting of a snake in her print painted by an artist. mixed with Maman, as Soleimani calls his mother. Mâmân with a gentle maternal grip, snuggling up to your chest I have a guinea pig that I had in Iran.
“In the past, when birds appeared in my work, they were just actors and symbols. They are the archetypal symbols of peace, war, death, and fear.” Soleimani says he sees a relationship between rehabilitating his birds and caring for people “abused by a corrupt government” through art. But she also considers her subjects to be very distinct. And she says, “In this new work, I want to use birds not as human-centric symbols, but as pathways to more vulnerable and attuned encounters with the non-human.”
When Soleimani’s mother first came to America, she was unable to practice nursing because of the language barrier. Instead, she rehabilitated birds and other animals. From her childhood, Soleimani became her mother’s ‘apprentice’, and “sometimes when the goose eggs hatched, her mother would call her and she would skip school and stay home,” Soleimani said. says. Together they watched a bird peck at its shell and experienced the first moments of life. “Having inherited her urge to heal, I now explore government, how we build systems for humans to care for ourselves, and animal health, how we, as human animals, take better care of ourselves. We aim to resolve the more philosophical relationship between care and the non-human world,” adds Soleimani.
Her parents’ story is also woven into nearly every corner of the house she bought in 2018, which she shares with her partner, literary scholar and author Jonathan Schroeder. She helps out at the clinic and teaches at Brandeis University with Soleimani. A dozen or so plants cluster in front of the cream-colored living room bay window, some of which he can reach the 12-foot ceiling. I gave it to Soleimani. There is also a 30-year-old jasmine tree that blooms each spring and her mother used to make wreaths for her Soleimani when she was a child.
The floor-to-ceiling library leads to the sun-drenched dining room, which Soleimani calls the “War Room” in honor of his father. “Growing up, my dad used to say, ‘Dinner is a place to have important conversations, not something like, ‘How’s the weather? Let him speak,” says Soleimani. The dining room she salvaged from a thrift store Her table was adorned with artwork, including a poster for the Art Workers’ Coalition, an activist group formed in 1969. Her tank and mountain range rug were given to her by her parents when she graduated from college.
The front door of the house has a hand-painted plywood sign depicting fantastical creatures in flight that frames the words “Congress of the Birds.” This is what Soleimani calls her clinic, and when you look at it, you imagine a large room filled with competing chatter of birdsong. This is also a riff on his 12th-century Persian poem “The Meeting of the Birds” by the Sufi poet Farid uddin Attar. A world where the birds of the world look for leaders. In many ways, Soleimani stands in for the mythical sovereign, guiding them on the path to enlightenment, until he finally discovers enlightenment within himself. “I’m stewarding,” she says, acknowledging the bird’s situation in a dangerous world and the fact that she is. Using her family’s wisdom, returned them the gift of flight.
