On the occasion of APERTURA, carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is pleased to announce A Game, or So You May Think, a solo exhibition by Iman Issa.
Laura Vallés Vílchez, contemporary art researcher, curator and writer, writes about the exhibition:
“A monument becomes an alternative to another monument. A description gives rise to another object rather than explaining it. A self-portrait inhabits another person’s life. A photograph resists the evidentiary status traditionally assigned to the photographic image. Across these works, titles, captions and displays do not stabilise meaning; they reconfigure the conditions from which objects become legible, gently shifting our attention away from representation and towards relation.
Perhaps this is what has long distinguished Iman Issa’s practice. Her works do not ask to be deciphered; they ask to be accompanied. They resist the immediacy through which contemporary visual culture so often demands recognition, cultivating instead a slower mode of attention—one attuned to hesitation, displacement and return. Meaning is neither concealed nor fully given. It emerges in the fragile interval where objects encounter the histories that continue to transform them.”
The full essay by Laura Vallés Vílchez will be available soon.
Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo) lives and works in Paris, France. She 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.
Issa is a recipient of the Vilcek Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Abraaj Group Art Prize and HNF-MACBA Award and was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie. Solo exhibitions include Lenbachhaus, Munich; Art Institute of Chicago; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Albertinum Dresden; Taxispalais Kunsthalle Tirol, Innsbruck; Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen; Bielefelder Kunstverein; Kunsthalle Lissabon; MACBA, Barcelona; Perez Museum, Miami. Group exhibitions include Centre Pompidou, Metz; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; mumok, Vienna; Tabakalera, San Sebastian; Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations, Marseille; Art Museum, University of Toronto; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; CaixaForum, Barcelona; DAAD, Berlin; Whitney Biennial, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the 12th Sharjah Biennial; the 8th Berlin Biennial; MuHKA, Antwerp; New Museum, New York; and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin. She will participate in the upcoming edition of the 17th Sharjah Biennial in 2027.
Her work is held in the collections of the MoMA, New York; MACBA, Barcelona; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen – M HKA, Antwerp; mumok, Vienna; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; 21er Haus, Vienna; Magasin III, Stockholm.