The International Center of Photography (ICP) is presenting "Panjereh," a groundbreaking exhibition by Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani that explores themes of political exile, migration, and care through the lens of her family's personal history. The exhibition, curated by Elisabeth Sherman as Guest Curator, features more than forty photographs, the vast majority of which have never been displayed in New York before, marking Soleimani's first institutional solo exhibition in the city.
"Panjereh," which translates to "window" or "passageway" in Farsi, builds upon Soleimani's ongoing "Ghostwriter" series, where she examines her parents' experiences as political refugees who fled Iran following the 1979 revolution. Known for her intricate, studio-based compositions that combine photographs, props, live animals, and even her own parents in surreal, magical realist scenes, Soleimani has expanded her artistic practice in this exhibition with the debut of a new body of work featuring injured birds. These powerful images draw directly from her work as a wildlife rehabilitator and founder of Congress of the Birds, a federally licensed wild bird rehabilitation center located in Rhode Island.
The exhibition also includes a new site-specific wall drawing created exclusively for ICP's galleries, adding another dimension to Soleimani's multifaceted artistic approach. Guest Curator Elisabeth Sherman praised the artist's unique vision, stating, "In her work, Soleimani uniquely braids together the complex particularities of her family's history, deep research into geopolitics and her inherited passion for care work into a visual language completely her own. The magically inventive spaces she creates allow for complexity in telling these stories, honoring their richness and continually unfolding nature."
Sherman further emphasized the significance of the exhibition, noting, "It is truly an honor to be presenting her first institutional solo exhibition in New York, specifically at an institution historically dedicated to photography that engages with the politics of our time." The "Ghostwriter" series uses Soleimani's family history as an overarching conceptual framework, specifically focusing on her parents' flight from Iran as political refugees and their subsequent journey to eventual resettlement in the United States.
The series performs a unique form of ghostwriting by both narrating and reconstructing the lives of Soleimani's parents without utilizing their voices directly. The works chronicle their lives in Iran as pro-democracy activists before being forced to flee the country, enduring both physical and psychological hardship during their escape. Soleimani's mother was compelled to abandon her career as a practicing nurse upon arriving in the United States, leading her to begin caring for wild birds—a skill and passion she would eventually pass along to her daughter.
Rather than employing a strictly documentary approach to address this complex history, Soleimani examines storytelling and memory as the primary means through which these narratives are transmitted. The construction of her photographs captures how detail and meaning are often obscured, transformed, or difficult to fully grasp over time. This artistic process is expressed through the degree of visual compression and accumulation of detail that characterizes Soleimani's photographs, where specific passages, details, and textures—including wildlife and plants, architecture and landscape—regularly function as stand-ins and metaphors rather than straightforward descriptions.
Soleimani skillfully situates artifacts from her parents' journey against backgrounds composed of imagery pulled from various archival family photographs. This technique results in works that are layered composites of multiple stories, documenting factual traces of history within newly imagined spaces. The artist's approach presents a distinct expression of her longstanding interest in Iranian history and contemporary geopolitics between the West and the Middle East.
A significant new development within the "Ghostwriter" series is the "Flyways" photographs, which draw attention to the plight of migratory birds, many of whom are wounded during their long journeys through populated areas. Soleimani's work as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator grew out of a care practice learned from her mother and forms part of a larger cultural inheritance passed down to her. The birds that Soleimani photographs and places within her tableaux assume the position of primary characters, providing a powerful metaphor for the many social, political, and environmental obstructions faced by people forced into flights of their own.
This new group of analog photographs that Soleimani created of rehabilitated birds presents a unique kind of maximalism despite their small scale, while also departing from the complex layering of reference and imagery typical of the "Ghostwriter" series. Shot in extreme close-up, these works render the bodies of birds as intensely detailed and complex worlds unto themselves, where feathers, talons, and eyes are described with the same rich detail that Soleimani applies to exploring her family history. The acts of care contained within these images highlight the crucial relationship between care and political resistance that has unfolded not only within Soleimani's own family but remains critically important for our present moment.
Born in 1990, Sheida Soleimani is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist whose parents were political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s. Her artistic practice excavates the histories of violence linking Iran, the United States, and the Greater SWANA Region. Working across various forms and mediums—especially photography, sculpture, collage, and film—she often appropriates source images from popular and digital media, resituating them within defamiliarizing tableaux.
Soleimani's artistic compositions are driven by complex questions that address contemporary geopolitical issues. Her work explores how to do justice to survivor testimony and the survivors themselves, examines connections between oil, corruption, and human rights abuses among OPEC nations, and investigates how nations negotiate reparations deals that often transform the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests. Her art also considers how the layering of memory and familial history can both report facts and produce a reckoning with the intimate resonances of geopolitical violence.
In contrast to Western news coverage, which rarely addresses these complex problems comprehensively, Soleimani creates work that persuades viewers to confront these issues directly and effectively. Her artistic achievements have gained international recognition, with her work 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 featured in prestigious exhibitions and publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, Interview Magazine, and many others.
Currently based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani serves as an Associate Professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University while maintaining her role as a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator. "Sheida Soleimani: Panjereh" will be on display at the International Center of Photography, located at 84 Ludlow Street in New York, until September 28, 2025, offering visitors an extended opportunity to engage with this significant body of work that bridges personal narrative with broader geopolitical commentary.
