Iman Issa
Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo, Egypt) is an artist working with sculpture, text, and installation. She studied philosophy, political science, and visual arts at the American University in Cairo and Columbia University, New York, and since 2020 has been Professor of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Her practice explores political and personal associations with history, language, and objects, often juxtaposing sculptures with texts. She has exhibited at the Kunsthalle Wien; the Neue Galerie Graz; the Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck; the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Belvedere 21, Vienna; MACBA, Barcelona; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the 12th Sharjah Biennial; the 8th Berlin Biennial; the M HKA, Antwerp; the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; the New Museum, New York; and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
Colors, Lines, Numbers, Symbols, Shapes and Images, 2010
Iman Issa’s series of six poster prints, Colors, Lines, Numbers, Symbols, Shapes and Images, interplays with the traditional communication tool of political campaign posters. In these times where politics bends or builds realities in conflictual ways, the question of visual literacy comes to the fore. As the title indicates, this work uses the typical visual components of propaganda posters, but in a way that is fragmentary and ambiguous. Individual letters of the Arabic alphabet, non-specific symbols, wayward lines and other elements float on a coloured background. Each of the six posters is different, and they might well all be conveying different messages, but we don’t really understand them. They are rather aesthetic, playful and beautiful in a way, but we might also feel frustrated in our efforts to make sense of them. How do we, the viewer, deal with this ambiguity?