exhibited and produced for: 20.04.2023-28.01.2024, No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection, Kunsthalle Vienna, AT



Iman Issa’s practice is characterized by a sharp look at the power of display in relation to cultural and academic institutions. While she often approaches her work experimentally – inviting the viewers to bring their own experience and expectations to the project – her practice is also marked by a precise and clear visual language. Her interest in histories, museums, and collections translates into a method of destabilizing preconceived ideas with respect to knowledge and historical transparency or accuracy by recontextualizing and recombining object-text pairings that suggest other narratives and visions of what we think we know. Whether she is questioning the role of art texts in her “Lexicon series” (2012-2019) or the relationship between the artist and their work in “Proxies, with a Life of Their Own” (2019-ongoing), Iman Issa’s work is always a nuanced contemplation of meanings below the surface of the visible.

In a proposition titled “I, the Artwork”, Iman Issa combines her own works with seven artworks from the collection of MoCA Skopje. The common thread linking these works – a combination of sculptures and prints – is that they all depict figures, many of their faces hidden from view. Her selection poses the question of whether the artist can take second place to their works and if an artwork can determine its own institutional and artistic context. Carefully selected and arranged, the sculptures, photographs, and video works interweave to create something akin to remakes, where original relations are removed, and new ones produced. By severing these ties, the artworks can no longer be read only through the artists’ biographies; instead, they inspire a variety of other, playful ways of understanding. Contrary to the usual hierarchies and preconceptions, I, the Artwork invites the viewer to engage in a playful thought process with alternate meanings and new connections. For Iman Issa, this process allows “saving the works from appropriation by making the appropriation very transparent”.

(Kunsthalle Vienna, 2023)



Iman Issa’s project “I, the Protagonist” explores how a definable notion of self and other intersects with the history of portraiture and its interpretation as a form historically associated with the representation of a visual and conceptual coherence of a figure. These notions will be explored in relation to the shifting individuality on which portraiture is based and by examining representations of existing and invented figures in the collections of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.



Iman Issa about “I, the Protagonist”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Wg3lKkKH4