She should know that life isn’t all rosy, 2022
Oil on canvas
40 x 50 cm
Let it not bite, let it kiss, 2024
Charcoal on canvas
130 x 90 cm
A crocodile ate a newborn hippopotamus baby, 2024
Triptych, ready-made napkin, ink
Each 30 x 30 cm
These series explores the idea of “home” as a fragile psychological territory shaped by memory, ideology, and the subconscious. Drawing from Soviet utopian aesthetics – smiling suns, flowers, peacocks, and ornamental arches – the artist revisit the visual language that formed the backdrop of her childhood. These symbols, presented as promises of joy, safety, and prosperity, once defined what “home” was supposed to feel like.
Yet behind their bright and affirmative surfaces lie experiences of fear, silence, and unresolved trauma. For me, this imagery becomes a double-edged landscape: a place of comfort and escapism, but also a site where painful memories were softened, masked, or rewritten.
In this project, “home” is not a physical environment but an internalized myth – an emotional construct shaped by social conditioning, collective memory, and the desire to escape instability. By reconstructing these utopian symbols, Maryam questions how familiar aesthetics can both protect and imprison us, how they shape our sense of belonging, and how women in particular inherit, internalize, and sometimes resist such scripted visions of domestic harmony.
This work examines “home” as a place where nostalgia and dissonance coexist, where the desire for safety conflicts with the weight of learned expectations. It is an attempt to reclaim this inner territory, to expose what was hidden beneath its decorative surface, and to understand how a home can be both imagined and survived.