Parisa Azadi: ORDINARY GRIEF
5th June, 2025 – 30th June, 2025
Botanic Gardens
Belfast Photo Festival
Times: Dawn to Dusk
A personal journey through exile, memory, and belonging in a changing Iran
In 2017, after more than two decades away, Parisa Azadi returned to Iran. She had left as a child and grown up between cultures—never fully rooted in one place. Her return was not just personal; it was a search for understanding. What followed was Ordinary Grief, a five-year photographic project that documents the emotional and political realities of a country in flux, and one woman’s attempt to reconnect with a place that shaped her from afar.
© Parisa Azadi
The photographs move between stillness and movement, sorrow and strength. They show everyday life under pressure—small joys, quiet celebrations, fatigue, and resilience. What emerges is not a single story, but many: of people adapting, resisting, enduring. Azadi’s lens doesn’t dramatize. Instead, it lingers on the subtleties of life lived in uncertainty.
Born into two worlds, Azadi grew up navigating displacement. Ordinary Grief is both a personal reflection and a broader commentary on memory and identity. It asks what it means to return—not only to a homeland but to a self shaped by distance. Through her work, she explores what is remembered, what is lost, and what persists.
The project is steeped in contradiction—hope amid loss, strength beside vulnerability. It’s a portrait of a country and its people, seen with both love and honesty. It’s also a meditation on what it means to belong, and how people hold on to who they are when the ground shifts beneath them.
About Parisa Azadi
Parisa Azadi is a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist whose work focuses on history, conflict, and displacement. She has covered the Syrian refugee crisis, the lives of Indigenous women in Canada, and the impact of extremism in South Asia.
Since 2015, she has concentrated on communities in the Middle East affected by political unrest. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Associated Press. In 2024, her solo exhibition at the American Center for Photographers featured Ordinary Grief, highlighting her thoughtful and unflinching approach to visual storytelling. She is a recipient of the Magnum Foundation Mobility Grant.
Parisa Azadi: ORDINARY GRIEF opens on the 5th of June, 2025 until the 30th of June, 2025 at Botanic Gardens, Belfast Photo Festival
©2025 Parisa Azadi
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