(warm gentle music) (attendees chatter) - [Announcer] Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauding) - Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

My name's Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director.

Terrific news on the horizon.

Tomorrow is spring.

(audience cheering) We did it.

Yes!

It arrives in great form tomorrow, we hope.

Today, we are thrilled to present Iranian-American artist and wildlife rehabilitator, Sheida Soleimani.

And I wanna thank our longtime series partner, the Institute for the Humanities, for collaborating on this event, truly an exceptional partner, in addition to support from our series partners, Detroit PBS, PBS Books, and Michigan Public.

Sheida's appearance here today coincides with the exhibition Flyways that's at the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, and which will open this evening right after her talk here on this stage.

So it's a great moment for you to get to hear about her work, and then you can go and actually see it and experience it in the gallery.

That's the Institute for the Humanities Gallery at Washington and Thayer.

It's just around the corner.

And we actually have a map that we're gonna put up at the very end so you can find your way there.

Then another announcement.

Tomorrow at 6:00 p.m., join us at the Stamps Gallery for the opening reception of What We Tend.

This is the 2026 MFA Thesis Exhibition.

(audience cheering) Yeah.

Celebrating the work of seven Stamps MFA students and artists whose practices unfold through care.

And refreshments will be served, so that's good news.

And the artists will all be present.

So do join us then.

Please silence your cell phones.

There is no Q&A in here today, but we will continue the conversation and have a Q&A over at the Institute for the Humanities right after the talk here.

And now to introduce our guest.

Please welcome the singular and savvy curator of the Institute for the Humanities, Amanda Krugliak.

(audience applauding and cheering) - That was so nice.

Thank you, Christina.

And thanks to the Penny Stamps Speaker Series.

And congratulations to the MFAs on their show tomorrow.

(audience applauding and cheering) You guys are awesome.

I've known Sheida Soleimani for almost a decade and known about her work since she was a graduate student at Cranbrook.

And so all of these years later, to be here and to have her here and to have an exhibition in the gallery, it makes my heart feel huge.

Iranian-American artist, activist, professor, and bird rescuer, Sheida Soleimani, explores themes of migration, political exile, queerness, and environmental crisis through the wildly imaginative scenarios that she first stages in her studio.

These elaborate tableau, which often include live animals, props, even her own parents, are then photographed by the artist, all part of her hybrid process of rich visual storytelling.

Soleimani's photo collages are surreal spatial conundrums.

Images and forms are dissembled and reordered, objects flattened, our perceptions of place and of time thrown off kilter, a visual trickery that makes us think harder about what we're seeing and where we are standing.

Soleimani has long been recognized for her powerful subversive work focused on human rights violations and the geopolitics between the West and the Middle East.

Her recent Ghostwriter series focuses on her parents' own personal stories of exodus from Iran into the United States as political refugees in the early 1980s.

In 2018, Soleimani became a licensed bird rehabilitator and founded Congress of the Birds, a nonprofit wild bird rehabilitation center in Rhode Island.

This is not by accident.

She recalls her mother's own lifelong practice of tending to wounded birds and animals, bringing them inside to heal; a place of refuge.

This profound shift in Soleimani's life and practice results in a revolutionary body of work, articulated in a completely original visual language, steeped in compassion and tenderness, but unsentimental, unpersonified.

Because it is the care, the time it takes, the attention given that becomes the through line in Sheida Soleimani's own story and practice, from mother to daughter, and past to present.

Soleimani's work is held in permanent collections, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, MIT, and KADIST Paris.

Her work has been recognized in publications such as "The New York Times," "Financial Times," "Art in America," "Interview Magazine," and many others.

Her exhibition, Panjereh, recently premiered at the International Center for Photography in New York City, and she has two new exhibitions opening respectively in New York and Brussels soon.

Please join me in welcoming Sheida Soleimani.

(audience applauding and cheering) - All right.

Hi, everyone.

It's kind of wild being in the middle of a stage.

Usually I'm like hiding behind my computer so (chuckles) we'll see how this goes.

I just wanted to say thank you so much to the Stamp Series for having me and hosting me, to Amanda for inviting me to do this exhibition.

I'm just so thrilled to be here and to finally be able to work together and for all of y'all for coming.

General housekeeping, I cuss a lot.

Sorry.

English was my second language and my baba taught me that words don't really matter unless you give meaning to them.

So I say a (censored) lot.

On top of that, I'm gonna give you a trigger warning now.

I am going to be talking about issues that deal with human rights violations.

In Iran specifically, there's one photograph of Neda Agha-Soltan who was murdered during the Green Revolution.

I will let you know before that photograph comes up.

There are images of birds that are deceased and there are images from finders of birds that are harmed.

So general housekeeping.

I guess we're doing a Q&A in the gallery, so I guess if you have questions, I'll totally answer them.

I just can't do it here.

All right.

I'm gonna jump into it and find this clicker thing in my pocket and then let's go.

All right.

Here we go.

This is a crazy setup, I'm just saying.

(laughs) Sound?

- Yes.

- Ah.

Did I come untaped?

- Here you go.

No.

- Am I good?

Okay.

Everyone, I assume, can hear me?

Great.

(audience member claps) Great news.

(chuckles) All right.

So everything they said about me is true.

My name is Sheida Soleimani.

I am an Iranian-American artist, I guess an activist, a wild bird rehabilitator, and a professor.

I've been making, you know, photographs since I was in my teens, but I really decided, you know, when I went to art school that I wanted to start making, I decided to go to art school, A, what a mistake.

(laughs) But not really.

I decided I wanted to start making photographs about what happened to my parents.

And I think the backstory is really important here.

So my parents are political refugees from Iran and you probably are hearing a lot of what's happening in the news right now, and so I'm gonna get a little bit, probably a lot bit, into the political history of our country.

My parents were opposed to both the Shah as well as the Ayatollah's regimes, and this is a really important distinction to, you know, consider and to make right now.

The Shah was, although, you know, less bad than the Ayatollah, also did not allow freedom of speech in the country.

The Shah was installed by, in a CIA coup d'etat, by the United States and by the UK.

And so, you know, there were a lot of artists, a lot of poets, Saeed Soltanpour if you're familiar was a poet that was, you know, silenced for his revolutionary poetry by the Shah's regime, and my parents were opposed to that lack of freedom of speech, so they protested.

And when Iranians were protesting in 1979 during the revolution, they were hoping for a better government to come into power.

And unfortunately, what came was far, far worse than the Shah, which it was hard to imagine for them.

So then they took back to the streets again.

My father and mother were both very much opposed to the Ayatollah's regime.

They were part of a leftist, a Marxist political group.

They would organize, they were both working in the hospital, and they would actually hold their revolutionary meetings inside of the emergency room, because it was the only place that both the Sepah or the Basij that came into power were not able to enter and find them when they were hosting meetings.

My father was very active in this political group.

He disseminated speeches, posters, a publication.

My mother was also involved.

And because of that work, he was, you know, in hiding.

He had to go into hiding.

He was sought out.

And when he was in hiding for three years, they were coming after him trying to kill him.

My mother was also, you know, in hiding with my father, and eventually my father had to escape the country, over horseback, a three-week journey with smugglers to Turkey.

My mother, when she tried to escape, was put into solitary confinement for over a year.

And so these are stories I grew up with.

I grew up in the cornfields of Ohio in a place where, you know, most of the kids at school didn't even know where Iran was, Iran, Iraq, you know, the whole region just kind of became a singular thing, especially post 9/11.

And when I started making work in college I wanted to make it about these stories.

And I was very dissuaded by my professors.

I had white professors that told me to stay away from making quote, unquote, personal work.

And encouraged me to make quote, unquote, global work.

And so I remember, this is the first piece that I made when I got to grad school at Cranbrook in 2013.

I'd gone through four years of undergrad, wanted to make work about my family story, was kind of told that I shouldn't do that because no one could relate to it, and then ended up, you know, getting to grad school and being like, "Okay, well, I really care about human rights violation issues.

How can I make this work that I wanna make but not make it about my parents?"

And so I ended up making this photograph.

This is called "GDP Iran."

This was made in 2012.

So if you look at GDP, the gross domestic product report of a country, you kind of get an idea of what's, you know, happening in the country, what they trade, you know, what they import.

98% of Iran's GDP is oil.

The other 2% is agricultural.

And so I started thinking about the history of portraiture and I didn't wanna make a portrait, you know, of a person.

And so this is supposed to be a portrait of the country, of the GDP, pomegranates, pistachios, saffron, all drowning in this oil.

I remember I made this photo and I was like, "Oh my God, I'm so proud of this.

I like finally made something global."

And I showed it to my baba and he said, "Baba, what is this?

It's too pretty.

It's not doing anything."

And I think that was my challenge from him, was to hear, you know, that something is too pretty.

What does that mean?

Is it actually going to provoke?

So I started thinking about history of color.

Color is a political mechanism.

I started thinking about color revolutions an idea introduced by the Soviets in the '50s they were really like the masters of, like, infiltrating people's like psyches, I think.

Color revolutions are, you know, this kind of way to get a general population to kind of jump onto the bandwagon of a revolution without understanding what it might mean.

The same way it works here in elections.

Let's say you're going to the polls, your neighbor has a sign that says, "Vote yes on Issue 4."

You like your neighbor, you think they're like a relatively nice person, you don't talk to them much, but you're like, "Okay, yeah, I like them."

And then your other neighbor puts up a sign that says, "Vote yes for Issue 4."

And you're like, "Okay, Issue 4.

I guess it's a thing."

And then you go to the polls and you realize that you didn't know what Issue 4 was, but you like both of your neighbors next door, so you might as well just vote for it.

You leave the polls and then you realize that you would have never voted for Issue 4.

You just saw signs for it and you thought the people that were putting up the signs were, you know, part of that.

That's not always what happens in color revolution, but it is a great way to get people interested and involved into a political party without getting them to, you know, understand the politics behind something.

And so I started thinking about the history of color revolutions.

I started thinking about this term that I hate, the Arab Spring.

Iran is not technically part of the Arab world, but we are part of the SWANA region.

I don't like using the term Middle East, honestly.

I started thinking about bringing that into my photographs.

So after the Green Revolution, I remember my dad, my baba said, you know, "That photograph that you made is too pretty.

Make something more difficult, something a little harder."

And so I was in grad school and I made this piece.

So during the Green Revolution, Ahmadinejad said that there are no gay people in Iran.

That's wrong, obviously.

(laughs) And I also was just, like, just so upset about that.

And I started thinking about, like, making a photograph about that and thinking about, like, the Green Revolution and the color.

And so I have, like, the party supplies hinting at the doctrines of political parties, Tomorrow is Nowruz, which is the Persian new year, first day of spring.

And so I also, you know, included sumac, somaq, which is one of the seven things that you set at the table, kind of playing with this kind of term of the Arab spring, of the coming of spring.

And I made this photograph.

And I remember I showed it at a critique in grad school.

And for those of you that are artists in the room, if you've ever had a cold crit before, it means that you don't talk or introduce your work when you show it to your audience.

You, you know, put it on the wall and for the first 15, 20 minutes, other people talk about what they see.

And in this critique I was just kind of absorbing what people thought this photo was about.

Someone was like, "Oh my God, that's her dad.

This must be about her being abused or having daddy issues or something."

And I was just like, "Oh my God, I can't, like, I can't believe this."

Then someone else was like, "No, that's not her dad.

That's Larry David.

(audience laughing) And this is a party scene for Larry David."

And I was just beside myself because people's cultural literacy, even if they are educated, even if they have the privilege to be able to pay for, you know, an education that is actually, like, pretty, like, insane, you know, it's a huge privilege to be able to even go to college.

And these people thought that this was my father or that this was Larry David.

And it took me back, you know, then in 2012, in grad school, to thinking about, you know, 2001 and 9/11, and thinking about how people in cornfields in Ohio said, "Oh, does your baba know Saddam Hussein?"

And my baba always said, "Sheida, tell them that I played backgammon with him."

(audience chuckling) And I did.

And so this is, you know, thinking about fighting adversity with humor is very important in my work.

Camp is very important in my work.

But this taught me that cultural literacy for Americans, especially, and Europeans is not really a thing.

You know, people don't understand or see the faces of rulers or presidents of other countries if they're not interfacing with them.

So that really made me think about, what does it mean to have to change that in my work to talk about these issues?

That piece ultimately became a failure because no one knew what it was about.

So I started thinking about forms of protest.

This poster behind me is just kind of an example from Occupy Wall Street, safety precautions against tear gas during protest.

My father was very active on the streets and he would say "A way to protect yourself against lacrimatory agents is to either rub onions in your eyes or to take a bottle of Coca-Cola, crack it on, like, the cement, soak a towel in it and cover your eyes with it," because the chemical makeup of Coke apparently protects your eyes from tear gas.

And so I started thinking about kind of tools, revolutionary tools or a revolutionary toolkit.

And so I started making work that was more like this.

So this is about, like, the end of my first year of grad school.

So this is just, you know, a tear gas kind of still-life.

It's also really important for me to mention here that I'm really not interested in photojournalism.

I think the history of photography is really (censored) up.

History of photography's a bunch of straight white dudes with their lens dicks that penetrate the world non-consensually.

And so what does it mean to provide an alternative to that?

And for me, that's using source images.

So this is, I'm about to show you an image of a woman that is holding an image of herself before her face was burned with acid.

So, you know, I started working, all of my family except for my mother and my father and sister are back in Iran and we communicate with them when we can, although it's been about 19 days that their internet's been shut down.

And I started working with human rights lawyers there and thinking about, "Okay, well, I'm not allowed to make personal stories since my professors in undergrad said that's a bad idea.

What happens if I can tell the stories of individuals who have been silenced?"

What does it mean to collaborate?

I'm not interested in taking an image of someone's likeness and reperpetuating it back into the world because the history of phrenology, physiognomy, all of these things, mean that people are going to look at a body and associate it and use stereotype and prejudice to categorize it.

And so in my images in my new photographs that I was making my second year of grad school, I started playing around with using source images that were given to me consensually by individuals that had been brutalized.

I was working with human rights lawyers, families of victims, printing these images, and creating these still-lives to tell these stories.

It's also really important to know that I would actually never make this work again, but I think it's really important to show process.

This next image is going to be of Neda Agha-Soltan.

There is blood, she is laying on the ground, her father and her professor helping her.

So if that's difficult for you, it's the next slide.

So Neda Agha-Soltan in the Green Revolution was just a student, a protestor that wanted a better government, wanted freedom of speech, freedom and autonomy for women, and it was a completely silent protest and very similar to the protest that just happened in January, snipers were just shooting people on the street.

She was with her father and professor.

She was shot.

And it was one minute and 52 seconds, and you can watch the whole entire video of her bleeding out and dying on the street.

Not too dissimilar from the awful body cam images that we see of Black bodies being shot in the street by police.

And so this was really important moment for me because I was, you know, 18, 19.

I'd just gone to college.

I'd never, ever seen Iran in the news except for if it had to do with oil.

And I was shocked that I was actually seeing something about a revolution on TV.

All of these images were pixelated, you know, everyone was.

There's a lot of, like, the pornography of pain, watching a body in pain, and I just wasn't sure what to do with it.

Michael Jackson died about 10 days into the revolution and everyone forgot about it.

And so that was another really interesting point for me.

But what does it mean to watch a body being shot or dying on a video?

It's eternalized.

You could fast forward it, you could rewind it, you can replay it over and over and over, and you're reanimating that violence.

The person's still going to be gone, but you're kind of watching that evidence.

And that was really, like, a kind of turning point for me of thinking about how I'm using images.

I made this photograph I was speaking with Neda's family, and there's screen grabs of her face from every 10 seconds before she died.

Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed in October of 2014 for protecting herself from her rapist.

And so I worked with her mother to kind of create some of these photographs.

So this is part of a series called National Anthem.

I made this in grad school.

It was kind of my intro to, like, thinking about, how am I going to tell stories and what's the right way to do it?

Again, I wouldn't do it again in this specific way, but it was a way that I kind of built those communications and language.

Also, it's really important to know that everything I make is really (censored).

(chuckles) It's constantly falling apart, and it's made out of, like, paper and tape and random printed images and things that are cut up.

But even though it's really (censored), it's lit with really (censored) nice lights.

And that's kind of the fun trick of photography, right?

If you shoot at f/22, everything's really sharp, everything's really flat.

People ask if I use Photoshop.

The big joke is I'm actually really bad at it.

And so everything is built and constructed in the lens, and that's really important for me.

I also use this lighting because I think a lot about product photography.

I want images to be seductive.

We are exposed to traumatic images on our phones, like, every second of every day at this point.

And most people don't want to be inundated with images of trauma, and it actually makes them shut off and not recognize what's happening in the world.

And so I really am interested in making my images look like hot and, like, appealing because I want to trick people into looking at difficult things without recognizing that maybe it's difficult at first.

All right.

So that takes me to after grad school.

I graduated.

I got a job at RISD as a diversity fellow.

It was the worst job I've ever had in my life, and it was the best job I've ever had.

I learned that I loved teaching.

My students were incredible.

Academia is a (censored)-show.

If you're in it, you know.

Especially if you're a person of color in academia, you absolutely know.

And so that kind of lit another fire under me to think about, you know, these systems that we exist within how can we, is it possible to create change from within?

Is it possible to teach and to, you know, dismantle?

You know, it's hard to say.

It takes time.

At the same time, I thought, you know, "I really still want to be making work outside of teaching."

And I started thinking about what was missing in my work.

National Anthem.

Here's another series that I would never make again, but it's important to talk about.

So I was thinking at the time a lot about observational psychology.

Albert Bandura was a social psychologist, observational psychologist.

He did the wire monkey experiment, which was pretty (censored) up.

And he also did this experiment called the Bobo doll experiment.

In a very early iteration of this experiment, he has two groups of kids, and the two groups of kids go into a room.

The first group goes into a room filled with toys, whatever was in fashion at the time, LEGOs or whatever, building blocks, balls, coloring books, toy guns, and this thing called a Bobo doll, which is this, like, really unhinged-looking clown-shaped punching bag.

And when you push it, they kind of, like, come back up at you 'cause they're weighted at the bottom.

So the first group of kids goes into this room and gets to play with whatever they want, and they're just watched.

The second group of kids, before they go into this room, looks at a video, which is the very top image you see of an adult model ignoring all of the other toys in the room, except for the Bobo doll and the weapons.

And she is behaving aggressively towards the Bobo doll.

It's not rocket science, kids are sponges, and they all, every single one of the kids in that test group goes into that room and they ignore all of the other toys and they play with the Bobo doll.

And that was really, you know, like their adult model was performing something that they legitimately thought was okay.

And that reminded me of the Iranian government and their endorsing aggression on women.

Culturally, you know, we are seeing, like, kids, you know, grow up seeing that women are going to be beaten or murdered, you know, in Mahsa Amini's, you know, case for not wearing their hijab correctly.

And so there's this, A, culture of fear, but also a culture of normalizing this aggression.

And so I started working with those human rights lawyers that I was working with again to kind of bring up the cases of women that had been consigned to oblivion.

My mama was in solitary confinement for almost a whole year in Khoy.

She was separated from my sister who was an infant at the time, and she was in a 6' by 9' room for that whole entire time.

And they say, after your first 24 hours in solitary confinement, you start to lose your mind.

My mom, you know, obviously no longer can work because of that either, which we'll get to.

But I started thinking about, in a sense, is she lucky because she survived?

What happens to those that don't?

What happens to those whose names are forgotten or their families don't even know if they were executed or not?

And so I started working with these documents with these, you know, PDFs that I was getting from these human rights lawyers of the names of women that had been either executed or disappeared and had not gotten fair trials.

So this is Sakina Mohammadi Ashtiani.

She was accused of murdering her husband, but it was actually her brother that did it.

This is actually how they're photographed.

So you can kind of see they're really (censored) once again.

This is in, like, the garage I had at the time in my apartment, but then the camera does wondrous things.

So does lighting.

So this is Shole, this is Reyhaneh Jabbari's mom.

That's Reyhaneh Jabbari.

I'm gonna kind of, like, go through these because I have a lot of slides and, you know, time.

And then these are some of the documents.

So the New Museum asked me to do a project for the Rhizome called The Download.

And in this project, I was asked to organize something that can be downloaded on a computer by anyone.

First off, it's really important for me to talk about the fact that, like, yes, I'm in the art world and I sell images and I sell photographs, but I have a ethic around what I sell and what I don't sell and who I sell it to.

It's very, very important for me that images go into the right places and they're circulated, you know, in ways that I find responsible.

So these images in this series are not meant to be sold; they're open source.

And so part of this photo, like, photo project was that in this, you know, Download, you can download this folder, you can have access to every single high-res image that I produce and do whatever you want with it, but before you get those images, you have to go through a nesting series of folders of these documents to learn about the history of these women, who they were, the execution records, the letters that Reyhaneh wrote while she was in prison, her final voicemail to her mother.

And so this is just kind of like an ethic I have around what it means to be making work with bodies and individuals that are brutalized.

Again, would not do it again, but it was an important stepping stone for me.

So I'm gonna fast forward.

There's a series of work I did in there.

So when I started teaching when I was 25.

My students introduced this, like, really ridiculous idea to me called self-care.

And, you know, immigrant parents don't really do that.

My baba has always said that grief is a luxury and I've, you know, kind of like, and that comfort equals death, and that I've kind of just taken that into my life.

And so I was making this work and my students were like, "Sheida, like, what are you doing to relax?

Like, are you okay?"

And I was like, "Yeah, like, I'm fine."

And they're like, "Well, what about self-care?"

And I was like, "What the (censored) is that?

Like, am I getting my nails done?

Am I supposed to get a facial?

Like, I'm not that kind of guy."

And then I realized that my form of self-care is coping through humor, and that's what my father has taught me to do.

And so I started making work in this series called Medium of Exchange about OPEC, the organization of petroleum-exporting countries, which, of course, right now is also very important.

Founded in 1962 at the Baghdad Conference, Iran was one of five founding members.

And so I had this whole queer cast of my friends, and we were all doing these weird, like, BDSM photos where oil is, like, this lubricant of, like, you know, cronyism and corruption.

Anyways, it was really fun.

They were really tacky.

They were really campy.

It was my way of coping.

They're not here because this presentation would take forever.

So we're fast forwarding to 2020.

I was sitting at a bar in Marfa, Texas, and drinking a Negroni, which is my favorite drink, and my last name flashed on a screen, and I was like, "Oh, (censored).

That's not gonna be good.

Like, I'm in Texas, and my last name's on the screen."

And, you know, I obviously know that I'm not related to Qasem Soleimani, but a lot of people didn't, and my phone started blowing up.

I was also set to drive home the next day.

So Trump had assassinated Qasem Soleimani.

He was an evil man obviously.

Trump's an evil man obviously.

But I'm getting all of these messages on my phone that are like, "Oh my God, Sheida, we're so sorry."

And I was like, "Yeah, me too.

Like, it's really gonna suck having the same last name as this dude."

And people thought that I was related just because we had the same last name.

And so I remember once again, calling my baba and they were like, "Oh my God, Trump is so awful.

We're so, so sorry."

Once again, cultural literacy.

They didn't know who Qasem Soleimani was, that he's an awful, awful man.

And I called my baba again, and my baba was cracking up as he does, and he goes, "Baba, tell them that that's your uncle."

(audience chuckles) And I was like, "Okay, fine, I will."

And I did.

I started telling people, like, "Oh, thank you so much.

You know, we weren't that close.

I never got to know him, but it's a really tragic loss."

And so what I kind of did in this, like, moment of research was learning that people just, you know, are so fixated on what's happening here.

They were so fixated on Trump that they weren't thinking about the whole situation.

Obviously, do I endorse what Trump did?

No (censored) way.

But I made this photo and this photo.

One of them is Trump's hand, one of them is Rouhani's but it's really important to me that I don't say who is who.

This started this kind of series Levers of Power in which I'm looking, I was working with a FBI-trained body language coach that trains politicians on how to give speeches, which was fascinating, but also looking at the gestures that politicians are making, you know, to speak at or talk at one another.

Obviously in my work with birds, I get really pissed off when people say, like, "Oh my God, a war hawk or a peace dove," and ascribing these kind of symbols to animals that, you know, they don't actually embody those things.

And so, again, one of them is Trump, one of them is, you know, the president of Iran at the time, and you're not meant to know who is who.

In the background, there's fragments of PS752, which was a Ukrainian airjet shot down by an Iranian missile.

And so there's this blame shifting that's happening.

Whose fault is it?

Is Trump worse?

Is Rouhani worse?

Is America worse than Iran?

And that was just kind of this conversation I wanted to start.

Then it moved into 2020, later in 2020 where the health minister of Iran is on stage saying, "We don't have COVID in Iran.

It's not real.

It's totally fine."

Well, turns out he had COVID while he's giving the speech.

(audience chuckles) And so I started isolating his gestures as well.

You could see in these satellite images, you know, there's these actual mass graves filled with lime powder where bodies of the pandemic dead are being buried.

So I'm gonna kind of move through these pretty quickly too.

This is about the man that ran Amad News who got lured back into the country and executed, charged with corruption on earth.

And this is Qasem Soleimani's hand holding a kind of mirror reflecting his hand in life.

Of course, I think is very important, so in 2022, September 2022, Mahsa Amini was murdered for not wearing her hijab correctly.

So this began the Woman, Life, Freedom movement which has continued.

The hospital released her brain scans.

You don't have to be a doctor to know that that doesn't look normal.

That's blunt force trauma to the brain.

And so making kind of these effigies or these monuments to memorialize not just the politicians, I don't wanna memorialize them, but I wanna memorialize the individuals that they harm.

Okay.

So pandemic is happening, right?

2021, 2020, 2021, 2022.

I am a disaster thinker.

My mother has trained me very well at that.

And my father is an essential worker, he's a doctor, and I'm convinced that they're gonna die in the pandemic.

And so, you know, and I'm not really sure how to make art or what to even make art about anymore, or does art even make a (censored) difference?

Like, who fucking knows?

And I remember calling them up one day and thinking, or saying to them, "Hey, like, I've always wanted to make work about you guys."

I did for a little bit when I was an undergrad, I was dissuaded, I remember in my 20s, like my late 20s when I first started making, like, those photographs from To Oblivion, and I talked about what happened to my mom in solitary confinement.

And journalists were obsessed with the trauma, and that really turned me off.

Like, I didn't want to make work where her trauma, or my parents' trauma, or immigrant refugee trauma was becoming this consumptional, you know, consumption, something that people could eat, didn't have without actually understanding.

So I finally felt like in the pandemic, I was ready.

In the early 2000s, there was this kind of moment where immigrant stories started turning into these ghostwritten books, and my baba would always say, "Sheida, we should have a person ghostwrite our story."

And I'd be like, "Yeah, whatever, blah, blah.

Like, it's not gonna happen."

And it never did.

And so during the pandemic, when I was convinced that they were gonna die, I asked them if I could be the ghostwriter.

And they said yes under three conditions.

One, that their identities be protected, two, that they're a part of making the work and we have conversations about every piece, and three, if they don't like the photograph after it's taken, that I can't show it.

And I agreed to all of them.

Those were actually really important ground rules for me.

So in 2013, when I was just in college, my mom made me this drawing of the house that she grew up in.

And this is also the same house that my father went into hiding in, the same house she went into hiding in, a house where she buried seven babies in jars after she worked in a Kurdish field hospital delivering babies that were affected by chemical warfare.

It's a house that held a lot of different stories and she would always talk about it.

Drawing is also a way that she, you know, talks about what happened to her as a form of therapy.

And so I've collected her drawings my whole life.

She also escaped from Iran with quite a few photographs, and those photographs became part of telling those stories.

So that's actually narang, a sour orange tree where one of the deceased babies is buried under.

Passports, I think that's really important right now, what document legitimizes someone's existence?

What means you can or cannot travel someplace?

So the stamp on their passport that says, "Admitted as a refugee."

And so I started thinking about making my backdrops a little bit more storylike using images from their home, from my mom's home, from their history, weaving them in and creating these portraits of them.

So these are the first two photographs that were part of Ghostwriter.

And then I started thinking about different forms of storytelling.

My mom, when I was growing up, would always draw her solitary confinement cell.

We would go out to eat dinner somewhere like Olive Garden, which was the fancy restaurant where I grew up, and they would give me, the kid, crayons and the paper tablecloth.

And my mom would take the crayons and she would repeatedly make drawings.

One of them was this drawing of her solitary confinement cell, of which I have many different iterations.

It was really important for me, you know, to ask her, "Is it okay to even, A, use this drawing or what would it mean for us to recreate this drawing and put you in it?"

And she actually said, "I think that's a good idea."

So we made this photograph together.

Her drawing of her cell projected large, painted inside of one of the backdrops.

And so I'm thinking a lot of the theater of the mind, of memory, I'm thinking a lot about magical realism.

If you're familiar, you know, obviously Garcia Marquez is kind of like the keystone, easy text that everyone knows, "One Hundred Years of Solitude."

There's this political choice that he's making in that text where he's jumping from past to future to present, back to the past, constantly.

You don't know how to situate yourself in that book.

And I think that's a political choice.

And that's exactly what I wanna do when I'm making these photographs.

They're kind of jumping from different points of time, and that's really important to destabilize that viewer in that way.

Okay, so I am a wild bird rehabilitator.

My mom, when she came to this country, was no longer able to practice nursing.

It was the true joy of her life to be able to care for people.

And when she could no longer do that and we were in Ohio, she was finding roadkill 'cause it's everywhere, and some of the roadkill wasn't killed yet, so she'd bring it home.

And my father being a doctor would bring home his, you know, medical supplies from the hospital and our Formica kitchen counter kind of became this makeshift surgery table.

And I grew up with my mom caring for these half-dead, half-alive animals, and that's how I kind of adapted to make it a work of my own.

Also, I was disillusioned with academia at the time, so I was trying to, like, get out and find something that brought me joy, and I knew that wildlife rehab always brought me joy.

So when my mom came to visit me in 2021, finally, I was just about to release this Eastern bluebird, a bird that had been hit by, or had hit a window while flying.

It's a really common cause of death, especially right now as we're getting into migration season, birds hit windows while they're migrating and they fall to their death.

This bird did not die, and I was able to nurse it back to health and care for it.

And the day that we were gonna release it, my mom was there, so we made this photograph together.

And it's of her hand emerging from the bars of the prison that she was actually kept in Khoy.

And screen printed on that photograph is a poem that she wrote while she was in prison about, you know, it might sound trite, but she's not a poet, about being a caged bird and being trapped and what it means for everyone to have to pay attention and to listen and to, you know, set people free.

So I made that photograph and that was a really kind of important moment for me, and then we released the bird together.

So then in the exhibition setting, like, people always ask me, like, if I'm a photographer and I don't say I am primarily, it's really important for me to think of myself as, like, an interdisciplinary multimedia world-maker.

And so every exhibition in Ghostwriter, and you'll see if you go to the one tonight has a wall drawing on it.

And these drawings are drawings made by my mom.

In this first iteration of this exhibition in 2022, I wanted the gallery to feel like this world that you're stepping into and kind of viewing these pieces.

So I'm gonna show a few more with my dad holding his suitcase, the same suitcase that he escaped over the mountains with, my mom and her suitcase, paying homage to my parents as freedom fighters.

You know, birds obviously keep coming into these stories.

"Buf-e Kur" it's a famous book by Sadegh Hedayat.

It means the blind owl.

It was a book, existentialist text.

But in the work that I do as a wildlife rehabilitator, one of the most tragic things that I see are birds that, owls that are hit by cars.

And when they're hit by cars, there's a lot of the surface area of their bodies is actually eye.

And so when they get hit, they either become neurologically blind, their retinas might detach, they become blind either in one or both eyes oftentimes.

This owl, unfortunately, was blind in both eyes.

And there is no way to be able to release these patients back into the wild.

They would die and starve and, you know.

So I euthanize them humanely.

And it's really important for me to include their stories in the work as well, and that's kind of what started happening.

This is called "What a Revolutionary Must Know."

It's from a revolutionary toolkit for, you know, people to learn how to protest correctly.

This was from the '70s.

Also, the red tulip is a really important symbol here.

It's a symbol of Iranian persistence and revolution, a leftist symbol originally, and it's because there's these wild red tulips that grow in the mountains, in the foothills of the mountains.

And right now is the time where the tulips are blooming.

They bloom every year but then they kind of die off at the end of spring.

But what they do when they're underground, when you don't see them, is that they actually multiply.

Bulbs multiply throughout the year and over the winter, and every year they continue to come back more and more persistent, and they've kind of become this symbol of Iranian revolution.

"Safekeeping," this is my mom kind of taking care of some of the American robins that are in my care.

The drawings that she's making, trying to describe to me about, you know, what her stories are, what she remembers, trying to describe to me this fruit that, like, if there are any Iranians in the room right now, I have never met anyone that's ever heard of a batabi.

It's apparently a fruit that's kind of like a citrus.

She says it's kind of like an otroj, but it's not quite.

So, you know, she's been trying to make this drawing of this, like, mysterious fruit that no one's ever heard of before, and I'm just, like, trying to figure out what it is.

So that's what this photo's about.

My dad does drawings sometimes.

(chuckles) They're not as good as my mom's.

This is a drawing that he made of his border crossing over the mountains.

When he was in a safe house in the mountains, he played shatranj, chess, with a former refugee that was, or for a refugee that was formerly in Iran that had escaped and kind of had this safe house for people to come stay.

And so that's about that chess game.

And then this next photo, this is kind of like, I don't know.

I'm like, I think it's really important to talk about what it means to, like, be an artist that's in constant self-doubt.

This is, like, I don't know if, like, a magnum opus is a thing, but if it was, this would be mine, and now I feel like I can never make work again after this.

So I made this piece about a year and a half ago and it's probably a piece that I've wanted to make my whole entire life.

It's my father riding the horse that he escaped over.

I created the horse.

It's a whole life-sized horse, a taxidermy mold that I got, made out of foam.

I upholstered it in hand-screen-printed fabric.

I built the, like, (censored) paper mache mountains and my father rode it in my studio, and it was a really important piece for me to make.

And I just haven't been able to, like, figure out my kind of, like, groove yet after that.

And I think it's really important to talk about that because people just imagine that, like, because you've done things, you have your (censored) figured out, but I'm, like, constantly in an existential crisis, so putting it out there.

My mom and, you know, the snake skins, I think it's really important when you see this work and we go into the gallery, you're gonna notice a lot of different creatures.

I'm not interested in symbols being projected on these animals or the kind of narratives that we make up for them.

Snakes are not evil.

Doves are not peaceful.

Crows are not, you know, ominous.

And I want to show these animals in a way that kind of pushes back on those stereotypes.

All right.

So fast forwarding.

At the same time that I'm doing all of this photographic work, I'm also doing this.

So this talk is, like, an hour long, and I guarantee when I go back to my phone in the back room that there's gonna be, like, at least 20 to 30 texts about birds that need help.

My phone 24/7 is constantly ringing with people that have found animals that need help.

And these are the types of text messages that I get.

And then these are some of my patients.

These are the cute ones.

And there's some sad ones.

These are baby blue jays.

Their tree got cut down.

So please don't prune your trees or take your trees down right now.

It's baby nesting season.

Wait until the fall.

This is a great blue heron who has osteomyelitis, that's a bone infection, because of a fishing hook going straight through his leg.

Sorry, I should have given you trigger warnings.

The next one's of a bloody owl.

This is one of the owls that's hit by a car.

This is of a lesion inside of a cormorant's mouth, again, from a fishing hook.

So please, if you do fish or if you're at a park, clean up fishing hooks and lines.

They cause insane injuries to these creatures.

This is a baby red-tailed hawk.

That's a maggot that I'm pulling out of its ear.

It's really disgusting, but, you know, it's another thing that we do.

And so this is happening at the same time that I'm making work, and it's really important for me.

For a very long time, I tried to separate these worlds.

I tried to say, "Wildlife rehab is all the way over here, and then art and academia are over here."

And the harder and harder I tried to resist, keep, like, separating them, the more and more it made sense for me to bring them together.

And so, you know, I started making photographs about it.

This is me actually taking a photograph while I'm doing physical therapy with this crow who had a wing injury and I had to move the wing so it could actually regain the use of the wing and flexibility of the wing.

A lot of people are like, "Oh my God, Sheida, these birds just know that you're helping them.

They must love you.

You're like Snow (censored) White."

I'm just so over these stories.

The projection that people have on these animals and wild animals to me is, like, insane.

This crow hates me.

(audience chuckles) You know, like, the birds that come into my care probably think that they're, like, in an episode of the goddamn "X-Files" and they're, like, abducted and I'm, like, poking and prodding them with, like, needles and shining lights in their eyes.

And, you know, I'm doing everything I can to help these creatures, but at the end of the day, they don't know that I'm helping them.

They're scared.

They don't want to be there.

It's not consensual.

They're not like, "Hey, let me check myself into Sheida's basement hospital," you know?

It's not in a basement anymore, actually, which is pretty cool.

(laughs) But yeah, I think it's really important to kind of push back on that and challenge that.

I'm seeing a lot of art right now that's about this, you know animal-human communication that drives me insane.

So I also made this, like, little crop.

I play around a lot.

I think, like, in photography, like, it's really important to play with, like, what is and isn't in the frame and is, like, this a more exciting photograph or does this make more sense?

And, like, that pressure and that gesture.

Images about window strikes.

I've also started keeping my camera, a camera, not my, like, nice camera, but, like, a (censored) film camera at my, like, actual triage table.

And so I've been photographing all of these patients that come in that are maimed by human infrastructure.

And this is, like, my real identity crisis, is that these images don't look anything like the images that I'm used to making.

So here are some of them.

They're shot in film, they're shot with close-up kits, they're of patients, you know, oftentimes right before I have to euthanize them, or right as they're coming into the world in this case.

A Baltimore oriole that's lost the feathers on its head from a window strike.

A crow that's completely blind because of neonicotinoid pesticides.

Birth defects.

Testing for deep pain to see if there's a response if that bird has a back injury.

A little tiny Eastern screech owl that got caught in an oil spill, shockingly.

And so what does it mean to be documenting in this way?

Is this photojournalistic?

Is it okay it's not consensual?

And how does that actually come into my work?

So I started kind of making these screen prints and these collages, these are the last few slides, and you'll see them in the show.

This is kind of, like, what I'm parsing out.

I don't think they're actually finished, but they're, like, on the walls.

So they're in some stage of being finished.

(chuckles) The backdrops are, I discovered about a year and a half ago a roll of film.

My mom just had, like, a Ziploc bag of rolls of film.

And I was just like, "Oh, I'm gonna go develop these."

And it turns out one of them was actually a roll that she brought from Iran.

It was the first roll of film that she ever took trying to learn how to use aperture and shutter speed and calibrate the lens.

They're all photos of the sky and they're all blurry.

And it's like, to me, it's like, what does the sky look like before a revolution?

And what does it look like right now during a war?

And what does it mean to put these birds that I'm caring for back into the sky where they belong, even though I'm euthanizing them?

And so they're kind of coming into these photographs in different ways.

Her drawings are coming in as like a codex.

So here, her solitary confinement cell window comes in, here, the windows of a hospital, that's a mourning dove that hit a window so hard that it's complete eye just hemorrhaged.

And then I'm just gonna end with these photographs of my exhibition at the ICP last year, so you can kinda see that photo of my dad is really large.

Yeah, there is some more photos of the exhibition.

And that last photo.

And then I'm just gonna go, I think the next photo is the photo of the map.

So if you would like to join me, the exhibition will be going thereafter.

Thank you so much for coming.

(speaking Persian) Free Palestine, free Iran.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (Sheida chuckles) All right!

See you guys later.

(attendees chatter)