"Reparations Packages" situates reparations in the expanded field. If slavery looms large in American historical consciousness as the example of unpaid reparations, Sheida Soleimani’s newest series reframes reparations as a global practice by which nations turn the ethics of historical injustices into playing fields for geopolitical and economic interests.

Like the staccato of machine gun fire, symbolic objects punctuate “U.K. and Egypt” (2020), none more threatening than the landmines of the Western Desert, a.k.a. the “Devil’s Gardens,” which have killed and maimed thousands of Egyptians since the Second World War, rendered some of the nation’s most fertile land worse than useless, and given Egypt the dubious distinction of ‘owning’ the most landmines on the planet: an estimated 21 million, or 20% of the world’s landmines. The Tudor rose, emblem of England, dots the desert no less dramatically, as Britain laid many of those mines in its battle against Rommel’s Germany. The train of camels crossing the foreground refers not only to the oft-ignored injuries that livestock have suffered from the mines but also to diya, or blood money, which various Egyptian groups have demanded as reparations for their pain. Just as the nation has called for the return of the Rosetta stone (removed from the nation in 1799, on display at the British Museum since 1802, and partially suspended in the air here) and Cleopatra’s Needle (given by an Ottoman ruler to the British in 1819 and here supported by a wheelchair), these groups have been seeking reparations from the United Kingdom, thus far in vain.