carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is pleased to announce A Game, or So You May Think, a solo exhibition by Iman Issa.

Something Else Appears Between Them
an essay on Iman Issa’s exhibition A Game, or So You May Think

A monument becomes an alternative to another monument. Or perhaps it merely borrows its posture. A photograph is given several possible lives. A caption approaches an object, pauses beside it, then moves elsewhere. Nothing is quite where it was expected to be. Iman Issa’s work often begins with forms we believe we recognise: the memorial, the museum label, the historical photograph, the self-portrait. These are forms accustomed to speaking with authority. They tell us what is being commemorated, who is represented, where an object comes from and why it matters. They appear to close the distance between a thing and what it is taken to signify.

Issa opens that distance again. Her sculptures, photographs and texts borrow the structures through which institutions stabilise meaning but reorganise them so that objects cease to function as evidence and begin to operate as propositions. A description may generate a new object rather than explain an existing one. Elsewhere, a sculpture responds to a monument absent from the room. A self-portrait unfolds through another person’s biography. A single photograph accommodates several captions, several places, several histories—even though only one is presented as correct. Said by whom, though? The question remains nearby.

This is not a practice of concealment. Meaning is not buried somewhere inside the work, waiting for an attentive viewer to recover it. Nor is every interpretation equally available. Issa constructs, in my eyes, her displays with curatorial precision: distances are measured, relationships carefully staged, titles chosen with rigour. Yet these structures do not resolve the encounter; they hold it open. They demand another kind of attention, altering not only what we see but the time our bodies need to orient themselves. The work establishes a framework in which certainty may emerge, falter and take shape again under only slightly altered conditions. An interval, then—but not an empty one.

Issa has described the question as a medium: a material as tangible as wood, metal or photography. Once posed, it is put to the test. It may change shape, even begin to undermine the assumptions that made it possible in the first place. What at first appears to be a game of identification gradually reveals itself to be something else: an invitation to take a stance. Another posture. Museums, archives and monuments do not merely preserve meaning; they produce the conditions under which certain histories become legible while others remain displaced, fragmentary or untold. Issa does not simply reverse this hierarchy by supplying the missing account. Instead, she allows the mechanism itself to hesitate.

And that hesitation matters. It slows the demand for immediate recognition, keeping us where identification would normally suffice. There, another question emerges: what do we trust when we call something “evidence”? It allows an object to exceed the intention of its maker, the programme of the institution in which it appears, or the history attached to its form. A work may enter a context without ever being fully absorbed by it. It may also point towards something that is not physically present: a vanished monument, a forgotten caption, a memory that never fully belongs to anyone.

In the exhibition, the works bring together elements that coexist without hierarchy. None fully explains the others, though neither do they need to. Between them, something else emerges: a relationship that remains open, a mode of attention that exists only for as long as the object, the text and the viewer continue negotiating their place. We might call it a furrow. Or a murmur. Or a fifth dimension. Or simply the space that opens when we stop asking what a work means and begin asking what conditions make it possible. By the time this page finds its reader, however, we may already be playing differently.

– by Laura Vallés Vílchez, art researcher, curator and writer.