Breaking Free
Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know
Contemporary Arts Center, 44 E. Sixth St.
Opens Friday, Oct. 17
Opening Reception: Friday, Oct. 24
For more information visit cincycac.org.
What a Revolutionary Must Know marks the first regional solo exhibition by Sheida Soleimani (b. 1990), an internationally acclaimed artist who grew up in Cincinnati and studied at the University of Cincinnati. Through photographs, sculptures, and a powerful video installation, Soleimani ghostwrites the lives of her parents—charting their escape from Iran following the rise of the current totalitarian regime in 1979.
“CAC has always been a space to champion bold and new ideas,” said Christina Vassallo, Alice & Harris Weston Executive Director. “We’re proud to open our 2025–2026 season with What a Revolutionary Must Know, a homecoming exhibition that offers powerful new ways to navigate the personal and the political.”
The exhibition features Soleimani’s Ghostwriter series, in which she “writes” her parents’ biographies through collaborative, staged photographs. The work reconstructs the couple’s harrowing journey from Iran to eventual reunification in the United States in the late 1980s. Through surreal and symbolic compositions—rooted in the aesthetics of Surrealism and Magical Realism—Soleimani blends history and memory into images that serve as monuments to survival, resistance, and healing.
Rather than retraumatizing, Soleimani’s photographs and video aim to repair. Her parents perform their memories inside life-size sets built by the artist—her mother’s solitary confinement cell recreated from a drawing she made years earlier; her father’s horse draped in rugs he once smuggled out of Iran. These deeply personal scenes become acts of reclaiming narrative and agency.
“Sheida Soleimani’s work reveals how global conflict leaves lasting marks on personal lives,” said Theresa Bembnister, CAC Curator. “What a Revolutionary Must Know is a timely reminder that the political is never separate from the personal—and through collaborative storytelling, Soleimani transforms memory into resistance.”
Soleimani is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist whose multidisciplinary practice excavates histories of violence connecting Iran, the United States, and the Greater Middle East. Working across photography, sculpture, collage, and film, she recontextualizes media-sourced imagery into striking visual narratives. Her recent bodies of work examine topics ranging from survivor testimony (To Oblivion) and oil politics (Medium of Exchange) to the ethics of reparations (Reparations Packages). With Ghostwriter, Soleimani turns her lens inward, offering a deeply personal reckoning with the intimate effects of geopolitical violence—stories often absent from mainstream Western news coverage.
Beyond her studio practice, Soleimani is also a licensed wildlife rehabilitator and founder of Congress of the Birds, a Providence, Rhode Island-based clinic that treats upwards of 1,000 injured and orphaned wild birds each year. This commitment to care is part of a lineage passed down from her mother, a political refugee from Iran who had trained as a nurse but, after resettling in the United States, could no longer practice medicine. Instead, she began volunteering with a local wildlife rehabilitation center, where Soleimani grew up surrounded by the work of healing wild creatures. Today, that ethos of care—whether for family, community, or the natural work—threads through her art practice as well, underscoring how tending to lives at risk can itself be a radical, revolutionary act.