Bobo dolls, ice cream eating contests, paper masks, and games of snap all seem unlikely forms for the representation of vulnerable bodies, let alone issues of state-sanctioned violence against women, the oppression of queer bodies, crony capitalism, trade cartels and environmental destruction. Yet the work of Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani often deploys absurdist play and performance to confound how we read gender and trauma in photographs.

The complexity of what it means to represent the subjugated has led Soleimani to build lasting conversations with her subjects as a way to speak truth to power. In To Oblivion, Soleimani worked with human rights lawyers and families of women who have been executed or disappeared for acts of dissidence in Iran, questioning what publicly enacted violence against women inculcates in a society, while also shaping a portrait of an individual who has been systematically erased. 

In her more recent series, Medium of Exchange, Soleimani is still working with portraiture, but rather than looking at the victims of power, she turns her eyes to its brokers. Questioning the conventional representations of the Middle East in Western media, in which people and places are frequently seen as ruins, decimated by war and corruption, she focusses instead on the international networks, which Soleimani sees as complicit in enabling such destruction.

The dominance of OPEC (Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries) in particular, skews relations between governments or supranational agencies such as the United Nations. For Soleimani, power is a performance that is mostly enacted behind closed doors, which she echoes in private performances at her studio that playfully translate the machinations of geo-politics into staged sexual encounters.

Devising scenarios from redacted documents and political speeches, Soleimani collaborated with some of her queer and femme-identifying students from all racial backgrounds who volunteered to play the roles of various ministerial OPEC representatives and their Western counterparts. Flirtatious, kinky liaisons take place between seemingly unlikely couplings such as the Minister of Energy, Industry with the Mineral Resources, Saudi Arabia and the UN Secretary General in a BDSM inspired Dom/sub pose.

Set against a DIY backdrop of collaged images of landscapes scarred by oilfields or mines, overpainted with graffiti markings and slicks of crude oil, the faces of her collaborators are hidden behind oversized paper masks of these powerful men who become the signifiers of otherwise faceless, impenetrable institutions.

At first glance the works look like kitsch digital collages that draw on pop cultural tropes and celebrate the freedom to express sexuality and sexual practices within Western culture. The absurdity of these satirical scenarios both eroticises and infantilises the represented men. However, there is a seriousness at the heart of Soleimani's work which addresses the very real issue of political disenfranchisement and what happens when a queer body wears the mask of power.

This text is an excerpt of an article written by Maitreyi Maheshwari about Sheida Soleimani’s project Medium of Exchange originally published in Foam Magazine 53, Play, in 2019.

SHEIDA SOLEIMANI (b. 1990) is an Iranian-American artist, educator, and activist. The daughter of political refugees who escaped Iran in the early 1980s, Soleimani makes work that excavates the histories of violence linking Iran, the United States, and the Greater Middle East. In working across form and medium—especially photography, sculpture, collage, and film—she often appropriates source images from popular/digital media and re-situates them within defamiliarizing tableaux. Soleimani’s work is held in permanent collections including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, MIT List Visual Art Center, and Kadist Paris. Her work has been recognised internationally in both exhibitions and publications such as The New York Times, Financial Times, Art in America, Interview Magazine, amount many others. Based in Providence, Rhode Island, Soleimani is also an assistant professor of Studio Art at Brandeis University and a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator.

​​​MAITREYI MAHESHWARI (she/her) is a curator and Head of Programme at FACT, Liverpool, where she is responsible for overseeing the programme of exhibitions, artists' development, residencies, learning projects and events. She has fostered an artist-centred approach that encourages a critical examination of the social impacts of technology. Before this, Maitreyi was Programme Director at Zabludowicz Collection in London. Maitreyi has also previously worked on the interaction programme at Artangel and the youth programme at Tate Modern.​ 

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