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For Wave Pool's 9th Welcome Edition, Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani created a field of 100 cast aluminum tulips, representing the first 100 protestors that have been killed in Iran since the slaying of Mahsa Amini in September of 2022. 

Red tulips are a long-standing revolutionary symbol in Iran, associated with martyrdom. The resulting group of sculptures were displayed upright off of the ground in a grid to form a “field” of flowers for visitors. As individual sculptures, the tulips were "plucked" from the field and laid flat on a small platform covered in a wallpaper photo print by Soleimani.

Each tulip is unique, originally sculpted in wax by a refugee artisan before being cast with a name of one of the first hundred protestors killed in Iran written onto the leaves in both Farsi and English.

How can one do justice to survivor testimony and to the survivors themselves (To Oblivion)? What are the connections between oil, corruption, and human rights abuses among OPEC nations (Medium of Exchange)? How do nations work out reparations deals that often turn the ethics of historical injustice into playing fields for their own economic interests (Reparations Packages)? How may the layering of memory and familial history both report fact, and produce a reckoning with the intimate resonances of a geopolitics of violence (Ghostwriter)?

In contrast to Western news, which rarely covers these problems, Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani makes work that persuades spectators to address them directly and effectively.

Through the photographs, sculptures and video of Sheida Soleimani: What a Revolutionary Must Know, the artist ghostwrites her parents’ lives, beginning with their escape from Iran after the current totalitarian regime assumed power in 1979. Soleimani’s exhibition makes the paths of her parents’ multi-year ordeal visible, reconstructing the tale of their flight from Iran and ultimate reunification in the United States.