| Denny Dimin Gallery is honored to announce the representation of artist Sheida Soleimani. Born to political refugees who fled Iran in the mid-1980s, Soleimani builds photographic tableaux that dramatize Middle Eastern geopolitics, satirizing the reporting of West and East alike. In working across form and medium—especially photography, sculpture, collage, and film—she often appropriates source images from popular/digital media and resituates them within defamiliarizing tableaux. The composition depends on the question at hand. For example, how can one do justice to survivor testimony and to the survivors themselves (To Oblivion)? What are the connections between oil, corruption, and human rights abuses among OPEC nations (Medium of Exchange)? How do nations work out reparations deals that often turn the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests (Reparations Packages)? In contrast to Western news, which rarely covers these problems, Soleimani makes work that persuades spectators to address them directly and effectively.
Soleimani’s recent exhibition in late 2020 at Denny Dimin’s New York gallery, Hotbed, featured her most recent body of work, Levers of Power, alongside an annotated survey of works from the past five years, including the Crudes series. The exhibition was reviewed in The New York Times and Hyperallergic and the artist was featured in the British Journal of Photography. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Jane Ursula Harris.
Sheida Soleimani was born in 1990 in Indianapolis, Indiana and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BFA from the University of Cincinnati, College of Art. Soleimani is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.
Sheida Soleimani is also represented by Edel Assanti in London and by Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels. |
