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Rites of Passage
John Haberin New York City
Sheida Soleimani, Daniel Shieh, and Immersion
Life in exile tends to come with too many memories and too little else. The parents of Sheida Soleimani, in exile from Iran, have brought something with them all the same.
Not that they had special privileges, no more than one would expect for intellectuals and dissidents at the hands of an oppressive regime. Rather, their memories have taken physical form, as "Birds of Passage." They take on a colorful form as well, as living creatures and in photographs teeming with life. It makes their memory harder to pin down but also harder to leave behind. Daniel Shieh, too, cannot stop thinking about his mother and her rites of passage to the United States, but the voices in his head keep multiplying, and they are still singing the national anthem. Last, immigration is only the first story in "Immersion" at the International Center of Photography, as Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, and Vasantha Yogananthan look to photography for a sense of place. 
What to leave behind
Which would you do? Would you cherish the memories, obsess over them, or do your level best to forget? It may not be a choice for many immigrants left without a home or a work permit—and with the undisguised scorn of MAGA acolytes and New York's law-and-order mayor. It may not have been for Soleimani's parents either, not when their past informed present needs and present politics. It might, though, be a choice for her. She is, after all, photographing them and, as she puts it, ghost-writing their memories.
She has a commitment to their aspirations and their memories, but also a certain distance. Born and bred in the Midwest, she never once refers directly to their past. She does not have to look back to Islamic art or artistic ferment in Iran today. She does not have to make a grand show of leaving either one behind. Even the birds look less than exotic. As for her parents, they look as if they could easily belong anywhere—anywhere that respects their humanity and intellect.
Yet they seem determined to let go of nothing, not even a suitcase. Portraits show them each in a room, doing their best to fit it all in. They ponder the items that they pin to the wall, even as most end up somewhere else entirely. They are lucky to have a place to stand when so much else has fallen aimlessly to the floor. They are the kind of people who could keep it all perfectly organized and all in their head, but then things follow them wherever they call home. Things could well efface them entirely as well, as in a multiple exposure of Soleimani's mother, face blurred behind recognition but everything else crisp and in its place.
Then, too, there are the birds. Her father holds a black bird by the beak while feeding it nuts. Both snuggle birds in their arms, for mutual reassurance, like a rooster named Manoocha. Nuts! Birds also have a place of their own, in photos that present them in front of a montage much like the one that they are assembling, as What a Revolutionary Must Know, but with a snowy mountain and red flowers in place of each portrait's cryptic symbols. They could stand in place of postcards to remember the past or as promissory notes for the future.
Life forms extend to a snake in the grass—or rather on the rug and amid the documents. Are they now beyond danger? They look reasonably at ease, her mother with one arm behind her back, but Soleimani has a greater claim to composure. She has assembled all this and must enjoy watching it fall apart. She is the one making connections as well, like the literal and figurative connections of wall drawings of what might be vegetation snaking from photograph to photograph.
Maybe she can afford detachment. She can keep her sense of humor while blurring her mother's smile. A stepladder appears, and it, too, can be easy to overlook when there is work to be done, much like the snake. Still, this is Soleimani's game of snakes and ladders. What of other refugees without time for fairy tales—or others still left behind in Iran? They will have to find their own rights and rites of passage.
Sing out
When Daniel Shieh thinks of his mother, he hears voices—and not just hers. In a work dedicated to her, five rows of portable radios rest on a broad white platform. They are the radios that she might remember, old enough to have dated badly, but not nearly so old as to look quaint. They are identical, and they play the same song as well. "The Star Spangled Banner" could well lull you by its familiarity, much like the radios, but you may not understand a word, no more than she. It plays in thirty languages, like a swearing-in ceremony for immigrants from around the world.
Is it a coincidence that they sing out from the Arts Center at Governors Island, with views of Ellis Island in the distance, where my own grandparents may once have arrived? Perhaps, but it has nothing on a second installation, a loose circle of rocks on the floor. At its center, a gold record slowly spins, but not just any hit single. It is a replica of the LP that sailed into space with the Voyager, to bring the voice of humanity to the universe. (Space aliens must be audiophiles.) It bears fifty-five languages and no less.
Speaking of dated, what of its message, of unity in diversity? Has the party of Donald J. Trump thrown that message in the trash or to the stars? Has the left cast irreparable doubts that it ever once held true? Shieh has his doubts as well. A shed leans at a peculiar angle, with little hope of shelter. A small concrete tunnel recalls air-raid shelters in his native Taiwan under Japanese occupation, an uncertain refuge from shelling by the United States during World War II.
Still, the tunnel has a skylight, bringing in the changing light of day, and Shieh seems forever the optimist. The photo of an American flag hanging over family bookshelves, in a tacky souvenir frame from the Grand Canyon, is not altogether ironic. He also enlists poetry by Chia-Lun Chang and tapestry by Arleene Correa Valencia. Her couple kisses, in white on black, and children in childlike color might be launching or capturing birds in flight. Others pose as An Immigrant Father's Dream. Shieh calls their collaboration "Where Time Runs Backward"—back to an immigrant's dreams.
Can, though, time run backward, even for MAGA and Trump? Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky sure hope so. Shieh's radios would fit just fine among the silvery replicas in their black shed past the Art Center's café. They are further souvenirs from a shared past—a folk guitar, lunchboxes for kids, an ESSO sign before Exxon, and no end of games. I myself got nowhere at all with a Rubik's Cube. The artists plan to give them all away at summer's end, replacing them with the treasured memories of other visitors, maybe even you.
One last show sticks to a prouder, sunnier view of diversity in art's present. The seven artists in "Anti-Venom," Jacolby Satterwhite included, take the lead in dance performances that pretty much blend together, gay and racial identity included. They also play in sequence for some two hours, so be prepared to be patient or to move on. Shieh's own show is so disorganized that it can be hard to piece together a subject or point of view. Still, it can get you hearing voices along with him. Just do not ask me to hit the high notes in "The Star Spangled Banner."
Finding one's place
ICP can hardly avoid taking immigration as a fact of life, apart from "Immersion." With some two hundred fifty photographs of Marlene Dietrich on loan from Pierre Passebon, it features an actress who fled the Nazis in 1930, the very year of The Blue Angel, and contributed what she could to her adopted country, from the movies to the USO. With so rabid a fan and collector behind the show, it cannot help attributing the work of Hollywood's top photographers and directors to her, her "personal wardrobe," and "signature lighting." Still, she is only one of those behind the film stills, publicity stills, and shots on set—and who can be confident telling them apart? A floor below Dietrich, Muriel Hasbun has made her way from El Salvador to France and, ultimately, the District of Columbia. Along with her complicated history, she is describing a supremely blended family, as I explain separately.
Could there be more to immigration than makes the news? One could almost forget the families lining up for Ellis Island to this day—not for admission to this country, but to claim it as their heritage. When Meeks tells of immigration to France, he is not speaking about boat people from Africa and risks of death. He is tracing the passage from the First World, from the United Kingdom and Spain, without an immigrant in sight. All photographs are traces, of chemicals in response to light. Meeks, though, finds the traces of humanity in where it trod.
He sees immigration as a kind of earthworks, from a circle of branches to rocks rising like totems from the sea. Craggy cliffs must have offered handholds but tough going. Still, traces have by definition faded and given way, and these look more faint than formidable. It can seem like cheating not to mention the fate of those who made the crossing or the reception they received, of hatred or welcome. It humanizes a political debate all the same. It also finds an alternative definition of the "real" France, not in a language and culture, but in the changing earth.
ICP introduces all three photographers as constructing a sense of place, not just in where they worked, but in their collected work as installation. Each has a room to himself, and individual photos vary greatly in size and in how they hang. Yogananthan shoots black children at play in New Orleans, just past the age of innocence. Taken together, the photos could suggest a playground. And yet they have no obvious object or rules of the game. The intensity of daylight or of shadows at dusk is itself too strong for just playing around.
Halpern adds sculpture, a bust atop a short pillar with a cinder block and steel at its base. He needs it to give Guadeloupe a history. It is the bust of Christopher Columbus, erected by French administrators in 1915, while photos look back to the imprisonment of slaves and the abolition of slavery. It is not, though, a linear or progressive history. The bust finds its echoes in the mask that a young woman holds just apart from her face. Text on slavery appears in a tattoo, because that, too, has left its traces.
I am not convinced that I am seeing installations. I am not certain, for that matter, of a shared sense of politics and place. Yet I know it matters, and each country deserves a history all its own. So does each photographer. In context, they also have a collective message. A native's or immigrant's tale does not begin or end with birth or immigration.
Sheida Soleimani ran at Denny through October 7, 2023, Daniel Shieh at the Arts Center at Governors Island through October 1. "Immersion" ran at the International Center of Photography through January 8, 2024.