Parisa Azadi
Ordinary Grief
Ordinary Grief is a story of tenuous reconciliation. In 2017, after 25 years in Canada, Parisa Azadi returned to Iran, where she embarked on a personal and political reclamation of her identity and history. As a woman who grew up between East and West, straddling the line between insider and outsider, Azadi documents the lives of Iranians actively trying to create new futures for themselves despite the odds. This project is a love letter to a country from which she feels estranged, despite having been born there. It explores what it means to forget and what it means to try to remember—reconciling despair and joy, exhaustion and hope. Always attuned to moments of serenity, celebration, and ritual in the shadows of perpetual grief, Azadi’s photographs document emotional, physical, and political limbo.
The video “Yadegari,” co-directed by Parisa Azadi and José Bautista, is also on display.
