In Two Shows, Maryam Yousif’s Clay Sculptures Evoke Mesopotamian Culture and the Divine Feminine

Art is a space where conversations collide in Maryam Yousif’s whimsical, cheeky and thoughtful three-dimensional works—exchanges that connect the women of Mesopotamia’s long history with family memories of exile and the vibrant aesthetics of the Bay Area Funk movement.

Deeply connected with her Chaldean and Assyrian roots, Yousif’s visit to the British Museum in 2018, where she saw ancient Iraqi artifacts, became a decisive moment in the young artist’s formative years. This visit exposed her to a rich past and visual culture around the time that she began experimenting with clay. While Yousif and her family left a turbulent Iraq in the 1990s, this uprootedness gave way to an embrace of diverse influences and creative hybridity that permeate her various shows, including two new solo exhibitions this year: “Tremble Like Reeds” at Rebecca Camacho Presents and “Riverbend” at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco.

Yousif explored the percolating influence of Iraq and its multilayered history as early as 2017 in her first show that engaged with the legend of Assyrian Queen Shamiram (also known as Shammuramat or Semiramis). This queen, who lived in the 9th century BCE, unusually kept her status upon the death of her husband and into her son’s reign, leading many researchers to affirm that she may have co-ruled. The details of her personality remain enigmatic, yet she was powerful during her lifetime and inspired later authors and artists to see in her a warrior-queen and mythological builder of Babylon. This potent figure prompted Yousif’s altar-like installation mixing old iconographies (a horse-drawn carriage) and more modern ones (hands holding crossed sabers reminiscent of Baghdad’s triumphant Victory Arch, which commemorates the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s).

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In 2018, the artist turned her gaze to Queen Puabi—another Mesopotamian female ruler whose extravagant tomb excavated in the 1920s in Ur showed opulence and personal taste—reimagining items used in her lavish burial. This led to an eclectic installation that included sculptures of crowns and regalia, amphoras, jewelry and musical objects.

These experiments charted a course for Yousif to explore the achievements and legacies of other prominent Mesopotamian women such as Enheduanna—history’s first recorded author, who the Morgan Library recently recognized—an influence pulsating across “Tremble Like Reeds,” whose title borrows from one of Enheduanna’s verses.

Poet; high priestess of Sumerian goddess of love, fertility and war Inanna (later known as Ishtar); and daughter of King Sargon, Enheduanna lived more than 3,000 years ago. “Enheduanna was an arm of her father’s kingdom which expanded to the south. She was a bridging factor in this new cult,” Yousif tells Observer, underscoring her admiration for this extant ancient poetry and style. In her famed Exaltation of Inanna, devoted to the goddess she served, Enheduanna writes: “At her loud cries, the gods of the Land become scared. Her roaring makes the Anuna gods tremble like a solitary reed. At her rumbling, they hide all together.”

In this latest show, Yousif invites us on an allegorical journey through fecund time and place nested in Iraq’s two mighty rivers—the Tigris and Euphrates—considering transmission as an overarching theme. The goddess’ strength (and women’s agency more generally) is shown through embodied work. We contemplate the metaphorical nakedness of a single reed and divine wrath in sculptures and installations that revisit these famed Mesopotamian mythologies and folklore, as well as more intimate stories.

The works in Yousif’s “Habibti” series (“a term of endearment” for the artist) are buff clay sculptures of voluptuous women that channel the ancient form of Sumerian votive statues crafted to petition the gods on behalf of devotees. Here, they are playfully adorned with flowers, ruffles and reeds. In Lion of Babylon with Seated Ishtar (2024), we see the goddess mounting a lion—an animal long associated with Inanna/Ishtar. Yousif’s statue represents another located in the ancient site of Babylon showing a lion seemingly mating with a human figure. In the original sculpture, the lion wears a saddle, on which people believed the goddess may have sat. Yousif reimagines this absence at the same time as she reckons with personal loss. Her family used to visit the site before their exile from Iraq, as a family photograph memorializes.

Migration (2024) shows birds on tree branches about to begin their seasonal flights, and we wonder, perhaps like Yousif, about their eventual return and how much the journey might transform them. These ruminations about Iraq’s collective and family history take us to familiar landscapes—palm trees, marshlands, riverine crossings—once imagined eternal and that are now under increasing danger due to conflict, climate change and careless policies. They are reminiscent of a golden age often steeped in the nostalgia and curiosity that commonly tint diasporic inquiries.

Yousif came of age with the U.S. invasion of her native country. This violence—at once made physically distant by exile and excruciatingly close and painful—features in her other solo show, “Riverbend.”

Riverbend was a 20-something anonymous blogger who chronicled life under the U.S. occupation in her blog, Baghdad Burning. Writing in English, Riverbend related her frustration with the political class, the civilian impact of sectarian strife, the electricity outages and the disenchantment of young people wishing for a better life in clear-eyed, no-nonsense posts. (from Riverbend’s blog: “Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he’s wanted to marry for the last six years? I don’t think so.”)

“It’s hard to make work based on things that are more recent because you could never do it justice, you’re not the one who’s experiencing that much pain and trauma,” Yousif said. “I wanted to honor her voice.”

Riverbend eventually left Iraq to resettle elsewhere. And like Yousif’s many other leading female characters, Riverbend’s mystery and voice are deeply enthralling, resonating with Mesopotamia’s many women storytellers while at the same time questioning, witnessing and authoring.

“Iraqis are very proud of their two rivers,” Yousif explained. “When I thought about Riverbend, visually, I felt a little pain—the rivers are changing, there’s a bend in time. I was thinking about her name in a different way than she perhaps intended. She was more hopeful. Her name meant a lot to me.”

“Riverbend” the exhibition includes an eclectic number of artifacts arranged in an excavation-like trove. Yousif’s imagery is expansive and generous. Works are framed in panels that recall comic strips as well as the architectural style of old Iraqi building facades and balconies. Arab divas, such as singers Fairuz and Majida El Roumi, whose songs the artist listens to while working in her studio, naturally find a place among Mesopotamian female icons and heroines. In a similar intention to blend timelines and symbolism, Iraq is also celebrated as the cradle of Arab modern art with distinct nods to pioneer painter and sculptor Jawad Saleem’s famous subjects.

The persistence of the archetypal mother and its pluralistic incarnations as goddess, queen and river anchors the significance of matrilineage and the influence of Yousif’s own mother in her artmaking.

“I’m looking to the past but retelling in my own way with a sense of agency that comes from my mother,” Yousif said. “She was my first clue into how to interpret culture visually.”

Her mother, who drew when living in Baghdad, kept a painting from the 1970s that made a lasting impression on Yousif’s own exploration of figurative possibilities and ways for art to subtly convey desires for looseness and emancipation.

Paired with Bay Area Funk visual cues with a sensitivity to vernacular expression, absurd cartoonish characters and bold color schemes, Yousif playfully evokes the distant past made familiar with intimate relics of memory and self-affirmation. The result is an exquisite rendition of an original artistic grafting process that leaves one under an enduring spell.

“Maryam Yousif: Tremble Like Reeds” is on view at Rebecca Camacho Presents through December 20, 2024. “Maryam Yousif: Riverbend” is on show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco through February 23, 2025.