Iman Issa is an artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna . Solo and group exhibitions include Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MoMA, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 21er Haus, Vienna, MACBA, Barcelona, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, the Whitney Biennial 2019, the 12th Sharjah biennial, the 8th Berlin Biennial, MuHKA, Antwerp, Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, New Museum, New York, and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Books include Book of Facts: A Proposition (2017), Common Elements (2015) and Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011). She has been named a 2017 DAAD artist in residence, and is a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015), HNF-MACBA Award (2012), and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013).
Issa uses a variety of forms and strategies to investigate the political and personal associations of history, language and the object. She creates ambiguous, poetic displays through the juxtaposition of text and object. Heritage Studies, the artist’s most recent series, draws its name from a field of academic and applied inquiry that relates to the understanding and use of history. Rather than proposing a stable reading of history, Heritage Studies examine dynamic sets of relationships — between cultures, sites, and artifacts — to articulate their relevance today. They are neither formal abstractions, nor “pared-down citations of reality,“ but attempts to communicate the act of perceiving the original objects and the relevance that they might hold for the present. “What do these new elements share with their sources if it is not the material, color, appearance, or shape?“ Issa asks “...they share a speech act. They are addressing or saying something similar to each other, and it is perhaps through doing that that they become the same.“
DATES & LOCATIONS,
Friday, January 13, 6:00pmat BLOCK MUSEUM
40 ARTS CIRCLE DRIVE
EVANSTON, IL 60208
