Reflecting on themes of migration, reconciliation, and photography as a bridge, join us at ICP for a conversation between Sheida Soleimani and writer and curator Murtaza Vali about her exhibition Panjereh, on view through September 28.
The conversation is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side and online. Tickets to attend in person are $5 and include access to ICP’s galleries. Arrive early to see Panjereh as well as Edward Burtynsky: The Great Acceleration, also on view through September 28.
About the Exhibition
In Panjereh, Soleimani uses her family’s history—specifically her parents' flight from Iran as political refugees following the 1979 revolution—as a framework for exploring how meaning and memory are shaped by migration.
Known for her studio-based constructions that layer photographs, props, live animals, and her parents into magical realist tableaus, Soleimani expands this approach in “Panjereh” while also debuting a new body of work: a series of close-up analogue photographs of injured birds. These works draw from her practice as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator and founder of Congress of the Birds, a care tradition she inherited from her mother.
In these new images, Soleimani draws attention to the plight of migratory birds, many of whom are wounded on their journeys through populated areas, using them as metaphors for the social, political, and environmental barriers faced by displaced people around the world. The exhibition also includes a new site-specific wall drawing created especially for ICP’s galleries.
About the Speakers
Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990) is an Iranian-American artist, educator and activist. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani makes work that excavates the histories of violence linking Iran, the United States and the Greater SWANA Region. In working across form and medium—especially photography, sculpture, collage and film—she often appropriates source images from popular/digital media and resituates them within defamiliarizing tableaux. The composition depends on the question at hand. For example, how can one do justice to survivor testimony and to the survivors themselves (To Oblivion)? What are the connections between oil, corruption and human rights abuses among OPEC nations (Medium of Exchange)? How do nations work out reparations deals that often turn the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests (Reparations Packages)? How may the layering of memory and familial history both report fact and produce a reckoning with the intimate resonances of a geopolitics of violence (Ghostwriter)? In contrast to Western news, which rarely covers these problems, Soleimani makes work that persuades spectators to address them directly and effectively.
Soleimani’s work is held in permanent collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, MIT List Visual Art Center and Kadist Paris. Her work has been recognized internationally in both exhibitions and publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, Interview Magazine, and many others. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is also an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator.
Murtaza Vali is a critic, curator, and art historian based in Brooklyn and Sharjah. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he publishes regularly in art periodicals and exhibition catalogues for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries. Vali is an Adjunct Curator at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, where he organized the widely-acclaimed group exhibitions Crude (2018-19), which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across West Asia and North Africa, and Guest Relations (with Lucas Morin) (2023-24), a sequel exhibition examining hotels and the hospitality industry across the Global South. He is also the curator of Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, an itinerant research and curatorial platform investigating the lingering trauma and legacy of partitions in South Asia and beyond. First appearing in Manual for Treason, a publication commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), subsequent iterations of this project have been presented at the Jameel Arts Centre (2022-23) and Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia (2023).
Sheida Soleimani, Deliverance, 2024 © Sheida Soleimani, Courtesy Edel Assanti, London and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels
