Looking Back - Venus, Ishtar and Inanna, 2024

Sherry Wiggins and photographer Luís Branco “look back” in a series of staged photographs of Venus, Ishtar and Inanna—all goddesses of love, sex (and war). These works are part of the HEROINES project, where Wiggins researches then embodies ancient female figures from biblical, classical, literary, mythical and historical sources in performative photographs taken by Branco.

Wiggins and Branco’s Venus in the Landscape references the early-sixteenth-century painting Sleeping Venus, started by Giorgione and finished by Titian. The Sleeping Venus is thought to be one of the first of the recumbent female nude figures, a much-used trope for the female nude in artworks from the Renaissance onward. Wiggins and Branco’s black-and-white version shows Wiggins as Venus, reclining in a field upon a bed of silks, her head resting on her forearm against a large boulder. She is naked and wears a blond wig. She looks directly at the viewer. Wiggins’s Venus is not asleep; she is fully aware of her (somewhere-in-her-late-sixties) exposed body.

Likewise, Wiggins and Branco’s Venus in the Mirror (after Rubens) is a purposeful reconstruction of Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens’s early-seventeenth-century Venus in Front of the Mirror. In Wiggins and Branco’s rendition, a blond and aging Venus / Wiggins gazes into a mirror held by her young attendants. But she is not gazing at herself—instead, through the mirror, she, again, meets the eye of the viewer. Wiggins is, in both nude portraits, staring defiantly at the long gaze of patriarchy in its representations of Venus and female nudes more broadly.

Ancient artifacts depicting the Babylonian goddess Ishtar and Sumerian goddess Inanna portray both as equally powerful and sexy. Ishtar was often represented standing straight and tall, holding her breasts as in the circa-sixteenth-century B.C.E statue Ishtar from Susa. Wiggins inhabits the same stance in the performative photograph Ishtar, She Is Still Standing. Wiggins also takes the form of mighty Inanna. We see Inanna / Wiggins standing strong on a mountaintop at dawn with her lion. Inanna / Wiggins is the Queen of Heaven and Earth.

(photography by Luís Branco)