Sheida Soleimani, Safar, from the Ghostwriter series, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels.
Sheida Soleimani, The Blind Owl, from the Ghostwriter series, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels.
Sheida Soleimani, Deliverance, from the Ghostwriter series, 2024. Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels.
Sheida Soleimani, Safar, from the Ghostwriter series, 2022. Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels.
Sheida Soleimani, The Blind Owl, from the Ghostwriter series, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels.
Sheida Soleimani, Deliverance, from the Ghostwriter series, 2024. Courtesy of the Artist and Edel Assanti, London, and Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels.
Ghostwriter
Sited on three billboards on Clark Dr, between Adanac St and Napier St, Vancouver, and on two billboards on Dundas St, Toronto
Sheida Soleimani constructs detailed compositions that marry photographs, props, found objects, live animals, and people to create magical, dream-like montages. Deliberately combining her familial history with the political, Soleimani’s practice considers her cultural inheritance, the environment, and migration, all through evocative, visually sumptuous pictures. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani often creates work that includes her parents as subjects.
Her works for Capture include Deliverance, an image which pays homage to her father’s two-week long trek on horseback to Turkey, traversing the Zagros Mountains. In this work, her father sits on horseback, a pose historically reserved in paintings for men in positions of power. He is depicted, however, without shoes, as a reference to the moment when his guide urged him to run in the snow to help regain sensation in his frostbitten toes.
Safar similarly references her parents’ migration from Iran. The image features pomegranates, fruits her mom planted from seeds she brought from her garden at home to propagate in her newly adopted country. The red suitcase in the image is the one her father used as he escaped over the mountains; the tag is from JFK airport, where he eventually landed.
Soleimani learned bird rehabilitation from her mother, and The Blind Owl features a bird, one of thousands that have come into the artist’s care over the past five years. It arrived blind and unwell and eventually was euthanized by the artist and her mother. The image includes sour oranges suspended around the owl that were also grown from seeds brought by the artist’s mother from her garden when she escaped Iran. The work is symbolic of the owl’s burial in the family garden, which is no longer accessible to the artist and her parents. Each image demonstrates the deeply metaphoric nature of Soleimani’s works, embedded with personal and cultural histories.
Presented in partnership with CONTACT Photography Festival.
The Clark Drive Billboards are generously supported by Tara and Chris Poseley, the City of Vancouver, and the Canada Council for the Arts.
