2 hours ago
8
As the daughter of refugees, Iranian American artist Sheida Soleimani’s work reframes caring for bodies – both human and animal - as a political act. Her new exhibition, Forest of Stars, will be on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery from 16 April to 22 May
Sheida Soleimani, Deliverance, 2024. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London, Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels , and Yancey Richardson, New York.Fri 3 Apr 2026 11.00 CEST
‘My mom got her first camera before the revolution in Iran happened, and she had all of these film photos that she took, and I would look at them all the time as a kid, but I never really thought of [being a photographer],’ Sheida Soleimani says. ‘When I was a teenager, I decided I wanted to try making photographs and explore the world with it’
Afterimage, from the series Ghostwriter, 2025Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London, Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels and Yancey Richardson, New York
‘When my mom was back in Iran, she was a nurse, and it was the biggest joy of her life to care for animals. When she was forced to come to the United States, she was no longer able to practice nursing because she didn’t speak English well. Growing up, she found all these injured animals on the side of the road, hit by cars, and started bringing them home. My father, my Baba, is a doctor, so he would bring home medical supplies from the office, and together they would perform makeshift surgeries on these animals. I grew up around that type of caretaking’
Correspondents, from the series Ghostwriter, 2024Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New York
‘For Ghostwriter specifically, [the subjects are anonymous] because I have been trying to protect my parents’ identity, because they’re both political refugees. My father is still very politically active. But the other reason is really about colonial history. With the history of photography comes the history of phrenology, physiognomy, how we looked at images of ‘the other’ and associated that with stereotypes. A big reason I don’t really show people’s faces or do traditional portraiture is because of that’
Safehouse, from the series Ghostwriter, 2024Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New York
‘I’m really interested in animals not being symbols at all, but having their autonomy. I think something that’s really prevalent in art is that people attach these ideas, or symbols, to the non-human that we’ve come up with, that have nothing to do with the bird at all. I really try to push back against that. I want the creatures just to represent the fact that they are just animals’
Khoy, from the series Ghostwriter, 2021Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New York
‘My parents aren’t shy, and they didn’t hide anything from me. I think it was their brutal honesty that exposed me to so much more that most kids never learn. My mom would put me to bed and talk about what her solitary confinement cell looked like, or she would talk to me about her patients at the asylum that she was treating in Khorasan. My father would take me on a drive when I was like, five or six years old, and he would talk to me about watching his friends get hanged. These visceral childhood memories that I had shaped my understanding of the world and how I learned about and dreamed of images’
Sheida Soleimani, Deliverance, 2024Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New York
‘The history of photography is a genre in a medium in a history dominated by straight white men sticking their lens sticks into the world, non-consensually. I’m really interested in challenging that type of perspective’
Egress, from the series Ghostwriter, 2024Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New York
The words on the white flag are the life motto of Soleimani’s father: ‘We are the wave whose comfort is our demise.’ ‘It basically means comfort equals death,’ the artist says. ‘It’s from an ancient Persian poem that’s all about how we need to be constantly moving to be able to be living, to be able to be thriving, and when we begin to slow down, that’s when we begin to die’
Because we do not remain still, from the series Ghostwriter, 2026Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New York
‘I have a really large library of props. I think of props as part of what I call my symbolic lexicon. These objects that build this language, that kind of move throughout my theory, that’s not just in Ghostwriter. I think about the object being map keys, as to how I’m building a language to talk about each event in the photographs’
Afterimage, from the series Ghostwriter, 2025Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New York
‘In Ghostwriter specifically, I’m looking at the ancient game of Snakes and Ladders, and it’s this game of luck and chance. You roll the dice. It’s really just a chance as to whether you roll the dice and you climb the ladder, or maybe you climb the ladder, but then you roll the dice, and you get bit by the snake, and you fall. This kind of luck and chance is very similar to the game that refugees have to play to be able to escape, leave the country or fight for their lives’
Truce, from the series Ghostwriter, 2024
‘We’re at war with Iran right now. There are so many people whose stories cannot leave the border of the country. The internet has been shut down for weeks now, and some people have been suffering under a brutal, totalitarian, dictatorial regime for almost 40 years now. Right now, it’s about bringing attention to what’s happening in Iran’
Behind the Door, from the series Ghostwriter, 2022Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Edel Assanti, London; Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels; and Yancey Richardson, New YorkExplore more on these topics
