"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.

“Italy & Libya” (2019) concerns the reparations package agreed upon by Silvio Berlusconi’s and Muammar Gadaffi’s governments, at the supposed heart of which was the restitution of the “Venus of Cyrene”, a headless marble statue of Venus and Roman copy of a Greek original found early in the Italian colonization of Libya (1911-1943; pictured on the right). On the left stands the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, an object that, by virtue of being used to justify Italian colonization, raises the fraught question about what it means to lay claim to an inheritance of blood. Other symbols take on gravity throughout the image, from the green flag of the Gadaffi era to the suspended 'Frontier Wire' built by Italians to separate Libya from Egypt to the black and white image of resistance fighter, Omar al-Mukhtar, which Gadaffi pinned to his lapel on his first state visit to Italy in 2009. If these objects all vie for the spectator’s attention, one must not overlook the background of the image, which might arguably be the real purpose of the reparations package: a promise of a $5 billion infrastructure stimulus package in the form of a new highway system—to be built only by Italian companies.