Faculty Spotlight: Sheida Solemani
Every month, we interview a faculty member for our undergraduate newsletter. In January 2022, we spoke to Sheida Solemani, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts.
Can you tell us about your artistic background and your journey to Brandeis?
I grew up in all white rural suburbs with two political refugee parents that definitely strayed from the norm. Between my mother’s dead things/half alive animals she was trying to save, and my father’s fascination with politics and the grotesque (alongside an over the top collection of animatronic Halloween decorations), my work just ended up absorbing what was around me: a surreal reinterpretation of normativity. I don’t think there was a definite moment where art "clicked" — it was always just a supplement to my life. There was never even any idea of "bein" an artist (especially not as a profession!), but more so the idea of analyzing things visually and applying judgement, value, and opinion based on what I would see and how I would choose to understand it. Later, as a teenager, I decided to pick up a camera for fun, and traversed all around the countryside exploring abandoned barns and factories, and doing photoshoots with my friends. Now, I like to use photography as a medium to challenge my audience to re-evaluate what they recognize.
I came to Brandeis originally as an adjunct and began teaching photo classes in the Studio Arts department. I loved everyone in the department and the vibe of the program, so when a tenure track job opened up, I applied! Happy to have spent the past four years amongst brilliant students and colleagues.
How does your artistry relate to your work as an activist?
Having parents who are both political refugees that shared their horrifying experiences with me as I was growing up definitely motivated me to want to share these kinds of conversations with others. Growing up as an Iranian girl in the Midwest, I quickly learned how Eurocentric the educational system here is, and how the news only focuses on issues that directly affect the United States. By using visual language to communicate the magnitude of human rights issues in the Greater Middle East, I try to create awareness throughout a range of demographics.
Your work combines photography, sculpture, collage and film. Why do you work across so many mediums?
Different mediums can communicate different points of a story. I like to use different mediums to highlight specific parts of the narratives I portray within my works — each medium serves as a different type of punctuation.
What are the values that inspire your art?
In my photographic scenarios, I appropriate cultural symbols to create mash-ups that signify my position as an Iranian-American viewing the SWANA region from an outside lens. By focusing on media trends and the dissemination of societal occurrences through the news, I choose to source imagery from popular media, as well as social media leaks, and adapt these images to exist within alternative scenarios. The breadth and topics of my work have always been interrelated, but have developed drastically within the past decade.
When I began creating my photographic tableaus, I focused specifically on the stories of my parents; chronicling oral histories to portray events that have been shrouded by Western reportage. In the 1979 Iranian Revolution, my father, a political activist against the Ayatollah’s totalitarian regime, was suppressed for his pro-democratic beliefs. After going into hiding, the government imprisoned and tortured my mother to learn about my father’s whereabouts. Their revolutionary stories about a time of societal upheaval in Iran have motivated me to confront historical and contemporary situations as a premise for creating staged scenes that highlight a tumultuous history.
Within the past few years, I have stepped away from my familial narratives, and instead have used the stories of various citizens to give a more global perspective to the range of human rights violations occurring within the Greater Middle East. In my series National Anthem (2013-15) I created an archive of images that were shared with me by a group of Iranian citizens that had undergone torture at the hands of the regime for various ‘crimes’. Through using the images from the archives along with my communications with the victims, I sculpted tableaus that were photographed in the highly-produced style of product advertisement. This series of images investigated a broad range of victims, while using a symbolic lexicon of objects that referenced Iran’s economic and agricultural exports; highlighting the correlation between the mismanagement of Iran’s economy to human rights issues.
What excites you about working with Brandeis students?
Brandeis students have such a vast reservoir of knowledge and so many different interests that inform their artistic practices! It’s always exciting seeing the variety of subjects they bring into my classroom to create new works.