Parisa Azadi

Ordinary Grief is a story of tenuous reconciliation. In 2017, I returned to Iran after 25 years of self-exile, where I embarked on a personal and political reclamation of my identity and history. With images spanning 2017-2021, Ordinary Grief is my attempt to reconcile despair and joy, exhaustion and hope. It’s about ordinary Iranians actively trying to create new futures for themselves despite the odds. It’s a love letter to a country from which I feel estranged, despite having been born there, and to the people who call it home.As a woman who grew up between East and West, straddling the line between insider and outsider, my experiences are difficult, unromantic, and fragile. I’ve realized that two decades of living outside Iran brought with them a kind of cultural and personal amnesia. Ordinary Grief is also about what it means to forget and what it means to (try to) remember. Always, I’m attuned to joy, despite the hardships: I sought moments of serenity, celebration, and ritual in the shadows of perpetual grief. The photographs mark the passage of time as they document physical, emotional, and political limbo: they question what it means to long and to belong.

Parisa Azadi is an Iranian-Canadian visual journalist and artist with a keen interest in history and conflict, memory and displacement. This is Parisa’s first solo exhibition. Parisa was the recipient of the Chris Hondros Fund Award (Eddie Adams Workshop, 2019) and her work has been recognized by the World Press Photo 6x6 Global Talent Program. Her photographs have been published by The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, Associated Press, Malala Fund, International Rescue Committee, among others. www.parisaphotography.com