About the Work

This tableaux photograph is one half of a pair where the artist introduces the mudbrick house where her mâmân spent her childhood and mâmân and bâbâ lived until leaving Iran. Their political refugee status continues to elicit fears of persecution. To literally shield their identities, or at least their physical likeness, Soleimani obscures their faces with hand-cut paper masks. In figurative, allegorical and metaphorical senses, she exposes the audience to their trauma and sacrifices, creativity and perseverance, their lives. An artist-cum-ghostwriter, she visually manifests mâmân and bâbâ’s epic journey and then collapses into these richly layered photographic portraits.

In her portrait, mâmân holds a Guinea Hen, ormorgh e shakhdaarin Farsi, which literally translates to “horned chicken.” She raised and rehabilitated another such bird in the mudbrick house. The story takes up many birds along the way as mâmân, no longer able to practice as a nurse in the United States, rehabilitates animals of the Midwest. She passes both the story and these caretaking skills onto Soleimani.

To create the portraits’ backdrops, Soleimani collaged together inkjet-prints of the ruins of the mud-brick home, of mâmân and Persian carpets. Construction-paper checkers allude simultaneously to the traditionally Persian game board of Snakes and Ladders, while the cartoon-like drawings, lifted from other drawings by mâmân, depict ingredients for warding off snakes in Iran—salted bread pieces scare  them off. The snakes also allude to the house’s rice cellar. They hid down there, as did bâbâ when the military came looking for him.