IN COMMISSION (FLYWAYS) | SHEIDA SOLEIMANI

A bird of prey with outstretched wings towers over a brightly skinned snake, positioned on a dry branch, supported by a mound of sand.
In Commission is a photograph from the Flyways series, created by the Iranian artist Sheida Soleimani as a commissioned work dedicated to industry and production mechanisms.
Soleimani’s choice is both poetic and historical, and Persian symbolism provides us with an initial key to interpretation: the bird of prey represents salvation and the future, while the snake symbolizes evil. However, upon closer inspection, the composition of the image reveals intricate details and a layered, complex work resulting from extensive research—not only in terms of data and information but also in details and patterns that merge, creating a continuity between figure and background.
Soleimani’s biography is deeply relevant: daughter of Iranian exiles, activist doctors against the regime, after imprisonment and abuse they were forced to flee to the United States, a story of forced migration. Soleimani chooses to tell stories of migration (often involving violence and abuse) collected from the Women, Life, Freedom movement, symbolically translating them into the form of migratory birds, which, like humans, share the precariousness of travel and the dangers posed by human-made infrastructures.
Soleimani focuses on architectures—both real and metaphorical—that symbolize and assert power, designed to harm, if not kill, in multiple ways.
Each photograph is a tableau, a collected story translated into images through a process of abstraction and reinterpretation: the snake’s skin reappears in regular squares, its recognizable pattern juxtaposed with the gray tones of destruction and death found in ruins, forming a backdrop that ultimately becomes the very stage where the actors perform. The bird of prey and the snake, good and evil, serve as reminders not only of those who face injustice, abuse, and violence but also of the forms of resistance and resilience that emerge—not only as mechanisms of defense but also as acts of struggle against systemic oppression.
Each photograph is a narrative, a personal detail of the artist and the protagonists of the stories she collects, as well as of the living, vital animals she rescues and cares for at the Congress of Birds, the bird clinic she founded. The clinic’s name pays homage to a Persian poem (dating back to 1117 AD), which, through the interplay of human flaws and animal species, ultimately dissolves the struggle for superiority in favor of solidarity.

Sheida Soleimani
In Commission, 2024
From the series Flyways (2024)
Archival pigment print, 101,6 x 76,2 cm
Courtesy the artist and Fondazione MAST

02/04/25