Sheida Soleimani is an artist, professor and a migratory bird rehabilitator who is the executive director of Congress of the Birds. She began rehabbing wildlife as a teenager with her mother, a political refugee from Iran. She continued her passion while attending college and graduate school, caring for wild birds out of her apartment.
Soleimani owns a degree in photography and in 2015 earned a master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
She began teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, but birds were never far from her mind. In 2016 she received her state rehabilitation license and began rehabilitating wild birds out of the basement of her rental carriage house.
Soleimani talks about the Congress of the Birds on “ART inc.” A condensed version of her conversation is below; the full interview can be found here.
A very non-consensual medium
I got into art when I was a teenager.
My mom always was doing stuff with wildlife. So we would have birds or animals that would die, and I would always document the deaths of these animals.
Photography for me, I historically view it as a very non-consensual medium.
I think a lot about photography being like this white man, Eurocentric penetration of the lens into the landscape that’s very much non-consensual.
And so how do you kind of create a consensual photographic practice?
And for me, that’s through set building, through creating a landscape that can be in front of the camera that I’m building and I’m a part of.
And the camera might be watching or documenting, but it’s not going into someone else’s life, and probing and taking from them.
I teach, I make art, and then my third kind of hat is wildlife rehabilitator.
And it’s kind of like where my self-care, or I guess my students would call it comes in.
If I’m interested in education as a professor, or in my work as an artist, why not also bring in these birds, and start thinking about a consensual photographic practice.
I don’t wanna photograph these birds and scare them.
So I have rules and parameters, and to also create that lineage between myself and my mother in the work that she taught me to do.
The caretaking.
