Iman Issa’s Heritage Studies are displays based on historical artifacts, which attempt to communicate their significance to the present moment. In her process, the objects are altered: Issa changes their materials, scale, and color to a degree that the resemblance between the historic artifact and Issa’s work can be difficult to discern. Despite these dissimilarities, the artist insists on the equivalence of these objects, almost like the equivalence between a photograph and its subject.
Heritage Studies #42, 2023
Iman Issa
Courtesy of the artist and Sylvia Kouvali London, Piraeus
Heritage Studies #44, 2023
Iman Issa
Courtesy of the artist and Sylvia Kouvali London, Piraeus
Issa also pays special attention to institutional modes of display and interpretation. She includes with her sculptures texts that reference the museological origins of the object being depicted. The objects come to exist somewhere between their material form and the texts surrounding them, positioning them within a network of signification.
Heritage Studies #40, 2023
Iman Issa
Courtesy of the artist and Sylvia Kouvali London, Piraeus
Heritage Studies #46, 2023
Iman Issa
Courtesy of the artist and Sylvia Kouvali London, Piraeus
This exhibition of Issa’s Heritage Studies is the first substantial presentation of these works in the US in a decade. Seen together, they illuminate the artist’s consistent desire to pursue an “art that is not exactly part of the world but is certainly tied to it, revealing of it, and not just because it looks or sounds like it.”
Iman Issa: Heritage Studies is curated by Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art.
Sponsors
This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago with major funding from the Bluhm Family Endowment Fund, which supports exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture.
