Iman issa biography

Iman Issa (born 1979) is an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist whose work looks at the power of display in relation to academic and cultural institutions at.
Iman Issa is an artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
Iman Issa is an Egyptian multi-disciplinary artist whose work looks at the power of display in relation to academic and cultural institutions at large.

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iman issa

Parables

18 April – 13 June 2015

Glasgow Sculpture Studios (GSS) was pleased to present Parables, an exhibition of work by Iman Issa. This was Issa’s first exhibition in a UK public institution, and GSS’ first exhibition with an Egyptian artist.

Issa’s work explores the relationship between history, memory, language, and objects. She does this through the presentation of multiple forms, including sculpture, text, video, photography and sound. Primarily interested in how forms can carry personal and political significance, her sources for the works are taken from existing material. This material is then stripped back to its essential elements and re-imagined by the artist into another form.

At GSS, Issa presented Common Elements 2013, an installation of sculpture, text panels and photographs. The work references the objects and displays at numerous museums across the world that are dedicated to subjects such as agriculture, textiles, transportation, folk art, military history, antiquity and war. The text panels are fragments taken from f

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Artist Details

Biography

Iman Issa was born in 1979 in Cairo, Egypt. She has bene the subject of many solo exhibitions, including at the Gezira Arts Center, Cairo, Egypt (2002); Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany (2010); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain (2015); and Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck, Austria (2020). She has participated in several group exhibitions, including Dar El-Hiwar, Goethe Institute, Cairo, Egypt (2002); Memorial To The Iraq War, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (2007); Buildering: Misbehaving the City, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH (2014); Memory Matters, Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden (2018); and Aimless. Confronting Imago Mundi, Es Baluard Museum, Palma, Spain (2023). Issa currently lives and works between Cairo, Egypt and Berlin, Germany.

Bio and website updated as of 2024.

Additional Information

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CAPE TOWN

4 June - 18 July 2015

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Iman Issa

Iman Issa's The Revolutionary is a sound installation describing the attributes of a fictional protagonist. Made using text-to-speech software, the audio loop creates a circular and infinite narrative based on the artist's notions of 'the revolutionary'. As Issa describes the work, from an interview with Maria Lind from 2013:

In The Revolutionary (2010), I was using narrative as a way to access what a term might refer to. I had been working a lot with text in projects like Material (2009-2012), Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011), and others, and it became clear to me that I was developing a relationship to text that was similar to the way I dealt with images and other forms. I felt that there were certain words I could use, and others I could not use. I also kept running into terms which I felt I had no conception of what they might refer to. One of those terms is the "revolutionary." And it wasn't a matter of having contradictory or multiple understandings or visions of what the