- There's flamboyances of flamingos.

Charm of finches.

It's pretty cute.

You have a murder of crows, like they're black.

Edgar Allen Poe doesn't really help either, with the, "Quoth the raven, "nevermore.""

(raven caws) It's all based off of how humans read them though, right?

All of these like names for these groups of birds were ascribing meaning to them without knowing what they actually do or who they actually are.

I am Sheida Soleimani.

I am an artist professor and a migratory bird rehabilitator.

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.

(gentle music) 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.

(can hissing) "Ghostwriter" is the first time that I am deciding to work with my parents and to discuss what happened to them, talk about their histories.

Both of my parents are political refugees from Iran.

They were persecuted by the government, for their pro-democratic actions.

And were able to escape and come to the states at different times.

A lot of my career, a lot of people have asked me, about my work and I've mentioned, my parents' story and people are like, "Oh, your parents were in prison?"

They're like, "Oh my God, there are political prisoners?

And they were tortured or like, they escaped, they're political refugees?"

And those things became like almost very exotic to people.

And I hate that idea that, people are ingesting trauma as a way to feel closer to something that they don't know.

And so that was a lot of my resistance in making the work that I am in "Ghostwriter," thinking about I'm not ready to have these conversations because I don't know how to control them.

I think a lot about like the quote unquote exotic, and what the West expects from the Middle East.

Rugs, oil, pomegranates.

Those are the kind of exotic things that we're introduced to that make our cultures palatable to Western audiences.

But I don't want it to be so easy.

I wanna make people work for the content, and actually learn something from it.

One thing I really am interested in is like the overwhelming color palette, but how that can read as welcoming and warm, even if it's about something sinister.

And so how can, like your eyes trick your brain in a sense.

And then once you are like pulled in because of the color, then you kind of have to start grappling with the content.

And only recently again, did I really start bringing birds into the work.

I've always wanted to keep it separate, because it's like therapy for me, right?

So like 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.

We're gonna pick you.

I will do wraps, I will do wing wraps.

If it's a minor fracture, I could set bones, even feet wrapped.

If there's something's pigeon toed, literally.

I mean, we're small but mighty.

So right now in the clinic we have a red-tailed hawk, that was a victim of rodenticide poisoning.

She's been in our care for almost a month now, so I'll be feeding her and releasing her today.

(gentle music) (gentle music) She was like really psychotic as a hawk for sure.