Art can be beautiful, art can attack, or it can do both at the same time. It has long been used to challenge the status quo, and Sheida Soleimani, a 33-year-old visual media artist and Brandeis University professor, has made it her mission to shed light on the challenges of her Iranian heritage through her politically-charged work.

“I want to leave people a trail of breadcrumbs,” Soleimani said. “I don’t expect anyone to have any crazy epiphanies. But if someone Googles one of my artworks, that’s a great starting point. The idea is to tackle important social issues.”

Soleimani’s art focuses on political oppression and social justice. Her style, influenced by her parents’ experiences as well as the current tensions and persecutions in their homeland, uses performance, film, photography, sculpture and other forms of expression. Soleimani’s newest project, however, uses the power of words: She’s ghostwriting the accounts of her parents’ experiences. She calls this her most important project to date. It will include photographs that focus on their experiences as political refugees and their challenges in adapting to U.S. life.

But that yet-to-be-completed undertaking comes after years of creating art. Bringing together images from news and social media, her bold, collage-like compositions expose disturbing truths hidden in encoded media messages. Her collage “Hotbed” (2020), for example, draws attention to Iran’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The work reproduces a detail from a press photo taken of Iran’s deputy health minister during a moment in which he was publicly insisting on Iran’s effective handling of the pandemic while simultaneously wiping his brow with a handkerchief. Soon after, it was revealed that he was privately battling the virus during this most public of announcements. Soleimani’s work satirically critiques global politics, power structures and both Eastern and Western cultures, revealing the overconsumption of political information.

Soleimani, who now lives in Rhode Island, grew up in Indianapolis as the daughter of political refugees who fled Iran after the 1979 revolution. Her parents’ stories of struggle and survival profoundly influenced her art, which often addresses the failures of the Iranian government to provide a minimum standard of living for its citizens. Her work also reflects the U.S. government’s role in the politics of Iran.
Soleimani said her father’s political activism and experiences as a young medical student in Iran, precisely when the Iranian regime was established in the late 1970s, have had an incalculable impact on her artwork and worldview.

Her father, Dr. Manoocher Soleimani, was a political refugee who fled to the United States in the early 1980s after the rise of the Islamic Republic. He recalled talking to his daughter about his experiences and their impact on her, furthering her interest in Iranian activism.

“What she absorbed from me is to improve the society around us, and the society around us doesn’t change if we pay attention just to our personal lives,” Dr. Soleimani said. “Life is bigger than all of us, and society demands that we pay our dues.”

Dr. Soleimani said he is proud of his daughter’s activism through art. He had instilled a philosophy of remaining “true to yourself” in his daughter from an early age, which he believes fueled her commitment to activism.

Dr. Soleimani also said his wife insisted on teaching Farsi, the official language of Iran, to their daughter. He believes the language linked his daughter “to Iranian culture [and] to her roots.”

Soleimani’s other artwork also takes aim at political structures and actions. She depicted top U.S. officials, such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to criticize the U.S.’ involvement in Iraq.

In one such artwork, she paints Rumsfeld holding hands with Cheney while wearing only a $100 bill towel and baseball cap, suggesting a corrupt relationship between politics and corporate greed.
The image of Kissinger kneeling beside the partially nude José María Botelho de Vasconcelos, Angola’s Minister of Petroleum, raising an oil-smeared diamond ring is a potent commentary on the global exploitation of natural resources by powerful nations.

Soleimani said ghostwriting stories of people from diasporas became popular in the early 2000s in the form of memoirs. Learning from different immigrant experiences about finding identity within a new cultural landscape, she was inspired to share her own parents’ stories.
“My parents’ stories helped me find my way to the stories of people like them.”