NADA New York 2022

Yousif borrows widely from antique and pop cultural sources, often combining them into “anything that looks fabulous,” as she says. Beyond this, though, her sculptures become unintentionally educational about her Assyrian-Chaldean roots, as she explores her own ancestry through an immigrant’s eyes. Iconography is parsed and compressed as Yousif pushes, bakes, and paints ancient art motifs (arbor vitae; all-seeing-eyes inspired by Sumerian idols) onto sculptures that adapt contemporary signifiers of identity, like musical taste and couture. Pop icons like Fairuz, meet Viktor and Rolf’s 1999 Russian Doll collection, meet bas-relief rosettes, meet the Tigris River and swooping Arabic script, all to share Yousif’s playful revisions of civilization’s chronology. Molding antiquity into modern time pushes symbolism forward, and imbues her figures with a charisma that invites collisions between the secular and the sublime.