Sheida Soleimani speaks the language of birds, deftly contracting her lips and breath to recite lilting sounds with clear bird fluency. As for the Iranian-American artist, it is her second language after Farsi. “Before I could speak English, I listened to bird sounds on tape,” says Soleimani, 32. She spent hours playing back recordings in her nursery, especially bird sounds from North America. “I didn’t really have any friends back then,” she adds.
Soleimani, the daughter of Iranian political refugees who settled in what she calls the “corn and soybean world” of Loveland, Ohio, now lives in Providence, RI, where she is the only registered wild bird rehabilitator in the city. When I visit her in May, she’s in her whitewashed brick basement—recently transformed into a bustling wildlife clinic—using the sounds of a Baltimore oriole to calm a Quaker parrot fluttering in a wood-and-mesh cage. The lime green bird, his wings had been shaved, fallen on her doorstep. “Whoever clipped the wings did a hack,” she says. The rest of the room is filled with other birds in her care, including robins, baby starlings, wood ducks, mallards, and two owls – an oriental screech and a beam. A rabbit has even been found in a park, seriously emaciated.
At the height of summer—the peak birding season—Soleimani may have left more than 20 birds a day by strangers on the porch of her black 19th-century Victorian home with cerulean trim. (“Most deposited on any given day is 29,” she says.) She also runs a studio out of her home, creating photo collages with hyper-saturated colors and starkly satirical views of geopolitics.
“I layer things and I construct things, and I do that to obscure and confuse, to get people to spend time unraveling or taking the work apart,” Soleimani says. “There are a lot of languages and codes that may not be visible to the viewer, but I don’t think they need to be.”
She spends much of her time here moving between the clinic, catching and feeding the birds, and the studio, which is located in a garage behind the house. Her recent project, the “Ghostwriter” series, part of which is on display at Providence College Galleries, “seeks to explore the relationship between the two most important care practices in my life: my work as a wildlife rehabilitator and my work as a artist”, explains Soleimani.
In ‘Ghostwriter’ she turned the camera on her mother and father, from whom she initially learned to rehabilitate birds. It’s also the first time her work addresses the personal histories of her parents, whose final years in Iran were defined by the dizzying series of political rifts – including a deposed Shah and the ensuing Iranian revolution – that hit the country in the late 1990s. 1970 and changed the couple’s fate forever.
The two first met in 1975 in a hospital in Shiraz – he trained as a doctor and she as a nurse. They were also pro-democracy activists who co-founded field hospitals for guerrilla fighters and Kurdish rebels. Because her father opposed The rule of Ayatollah Khomeini, who, Soleimani explains, “put a bounty on his head,” was forced into hiding before fleeing on horseback across the jagged Zagros Mountains, first to Turkey and finally to the United States. Her mother spent nearly a year in solitary confinement in Khoy Prison before leaving the country and reuniting with him.
In “Noon-o-namak (bread and salt)” (2021), one of the central photos in “Ghostwriter,” Soleimani’s mother poses for her daughter, her long white hair loosely braided and her face obscured by a piece of paper the artist cut and hung from her ear to maintain anonymity due to her status as a political figure. refugee. In the background a kind of patchwork of inkjet prints, some of which depict her mother’s childhood mud brick house, mixed with screen-printed snake drawings, made by the artist mâmân, as Soleimani calls her mother. Close to her breast, and with a soft maternal grip, Mâmân holds a guinea fowl, a species of bird she nursed in Iran.
“When birds have appeared in my work before, they have come in only as actors and signifiers – archetypal symbols of peace, war, death and horror,” says Soleimani, who sees a connection between her bird rehabilitation and her care, through her art, for people “abused by corrupt governments.” But she also sees the subjects as important distinctive. And “in this new work,” she adds, “I want to use birds not as anthropocentric symbols, but as routes to more vulnerable, attuned encounters with the non-human.”
When Soleimani’s mother first arrived in the United States, she was unable to practice nursing due to the language barrier. Instead, she rehabilitated birds and other animals. From an early age, Soleimani became her mother’s ‘apprentice’ and sometimes ‘when a goose egg came out, my mother would call and I would stay home from school,’ Soleimani says. Together they watched the bird peck through its shell and experienced the first moments of their lives. “By inheriting her therapeutic impulses, I now pursue a more philosophical relationship between government, the ways humans create systems to take care of themselves, and animal health care, the ways we as human animals can better care for the non-human. world,” adds Soleimani.
Her parents’ stories are also woven into almost every corner of her home, which she bought in 2018 and shares with her partner, the literary scholar and writer Jonathan Schroeder, who helps at the clinic and teaches at Brandeis University with Soleimani. Clustered in front of the bay window in the cream-colored living room are more than a dozen plants — some nearly tall enough to touch the 40-foot ceilings — a handful of which, like the cherimoya and the tamarind, her mother grew from a seed and on Soleimani given. There is also a 30-year-old jasmine plant that blooms every spring and which her mother used to make flower garlands for Soleimani’s as a child.
Beyond the floor-to-ceiling library is a sun-filled dining room that Soleimani calls the “war room” in honor of her father. “Growing up, my dad was like, ‘dinner is a place where you have important conversations, not a place for beautiful ones.’ ‘What’s the weather like?’ talk,” says Soleimani. High above the dining table, which she got from a thrift store, hang artworks, including posters from the Art Workers’ Coalition, an activist group founded in 1969 demanding systemic changes in the art world around inclusivity and representation. , and a maroon Afghan war carpet stitched with tanks and a mountain range, which was a gift from her parents when she graduated.
Attached to the front entrance of the house is a hand-painted sign on plywood depicting fantastic mid-flight creatures framing the words “Congress of the Birds.” This is what Soleimani calls her clinic and when I see it I imagine a large room filled with the competitive chatter of birdsong. It’s also a riff on “The Conference of the Birds,” a 12th-century Persian poem by the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, in which the world’s birds search for a leader. In many ways, Soleimani has become a surrogate for the myth’s sovereign, leading them on a path to enlightenment, until they finally discover it within themselves. “I don’t want to be the flight attendant, but I manage them,” she says, acknowledging the birds’ conditions in a dangerous world, and the fact that they using her family’s wisdom to return them the gift of flight.