A photograph survives, but the life around it has been dismantled. A voice remains on an old recording, but the singer has been forbidden to stand before an audience. A face flickers across a cinema screen, while the woman it belonged to has lost her work, her home and the right to be publicly remembered.
This is the terrain of Soheila Sokhanvari’s art. She has won the 2026 David and Yuko Juda Art Foundation award for her work, which asks what remains after a life has been pushed out of history – and whether a portrait, however lovingly rendered, can resurrect a woman consigned to oblivion.
