Sheida Soleimani: Flyways

March 19 - May 1, 2026
Institute for the Humanities Gallery, 202 S. Thayer
Gallery Hours: M-F 9am-5pm

Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist, activist, professor, and bird rescuer Sheida Soleimani explores themes of migration, political exile, queerness, and environmental crisis through the wildly imaginative scenarios she first stages in her studio. These elaborate tableaux—which often include live animals, props, even her 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 dis-assembled and re-ordered, objects flattened, our perceptions of place and of time thrown off-kilter. She challenges the viewer to think harder about the positioning of the photographer as a reliable narrator and the photograph as empirical proof.

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. The exhibition Flyways is a continuation of her Ghostwriter series, in which Soleimani explores her parents’ own personal stories of exodus from Iran into the United States as political refugees in the early ’80s.

The new compositions evocative of Soleimani’s family history and migration often include images of injured birds. In 2018, Soleimani became a licensed bird rehabilitator, and founded Congress of the Birds, a non-profit wild bird rehabilitation center in Rhode Island. She recalls her mother’s own lifelong practice of tending to wounded birds and animals, bringing them inside the house as a refuge, a protective place for healing. This profound shift in Soleimani’s practice to include bird rescue results in a revolutionary body of work steeped in compassion and tenderness, and articulated in a completely original visual language. It is the caregiving, the time it takes, the attention given, that becomes the through line in Sheida Soleimani’s own story and practice, from mother to daughter, past to present.

–Amanda Krugliak, IH Arts Curator

Sheida Soleimani is the 2025-26 Paula and Edwin Sidman Fellow in the Arts at the Institute for the Humanities.

Artworks in this exhibition first premiered at Sheida Soleimani’s New York solo exhibition Panjereh, at the International Center for Photography, in Summer 2025.

The wall murals included in this installation are re-creations of drawings by Sheida Soleimani’s mother. They depict the lost family home in Iran, and the hospital where Soleimani’s parents nursed the sick and injured during the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Images © Sheida Soleimani, Courtesy of Harlan Levey Projects, Brussels

Sheida Soleimani is an artist, educator, and licensed wildlife rehabilitator whose work examines power, environmental crisis, queerness, migration, and care. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani draws on archival materials, props, and sculptural elements to create visually lush, politically incisive tableaux. She works across various mediums, investigating themes such as oil politics and human rights abuses, confronting the systems of violence linking the SWANA region and the United States, unraveling their implications in American culture. Though her images are dreamlike, they are grounded in lived experience: her parents frequently appear as subjects, in compositions made from elements of their (sometimes harrowing) tales. Increasingly, wildlife enters the frame – injured and orphaned birds, with their own quiet stories of migration and survival. Before the lens, these animals encapsulate Soleimani's multifaceted practice: care as art, storytelling as resistance.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in institutions such as the International Center for Photography, New York (2025), the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2025), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2023), Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City (2019), Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta (2018), and MoMA PS1, New York (2017), to name a few. Soleimani’s work is held in permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and Cranbrook Art Museum. In 2018, she founded Congress of the Birds, (originally) a home-based clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, where she provides care for wild birds.