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Iman
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Issa
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Murtaza Vali
With an essay by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
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The Abraaj Group
Essay
Issa
Art Prize 2013
Foreword Savita Apte
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An extra|ordinary Introduction
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Murtaza Vali
Iman Issa’s Little Mysteries
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Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Common Elements
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Improper
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Iman Issa in conversation with Murtaza Vali Biography, Exhibition History and Bibliography
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Writer's Biography
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Acknowledgements
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Photography Credits
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Foreword
Foreword The Abraaj Group Art Prize was established to showcase exceptional artistic talent from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia and to focus inter national attention on the multiple loci of creativity in the region. Since its inception five years ago, the prize has been both a stepping stone and a turning point in the careers of many of its winners. Over the years, it has consistently grown and evolved so that it remains pertinent to the demands of the artistic community it serves. The cast of winners now numbers twentyone and each acts as an inspiration to an upcoming generation of art practitioners from this region. The prize is made possible thanks to the Abraaj Group, which is now the leading private equity investor operating in the global growth markets of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. The daunting task of selecting works that traverse national, regional and linguistic borders whilst being firmly rooted in the region as well as pushing the boundaries of mediums to their limits is no mean task. The Abraaj Group Art Prize is distinctly fortunate
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to have the expertise, patience and good will of an exceptional selection committee. I would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Antonia Carver, Dana Farouki, Glenn Lowry, Salwa Mikdadi, Jessica Morgan, Nat Muller, Elaine Ng, Julia PeytonJones and Murtaza Vali. The Abraaj Group Art Prize is grateful to its curator Laura Egerton and to the 2013 guest curator Murtaza Vali for their immeasurable support and calm guidance in ensuring that the ambitious proposals from each artist are transformed into works of art that engage the viewer by sharpening our attention to the ordinary and everyday in our lives. It gives me enormous pleasure to congratulate the 2013 recipients of the Abraaj Group Art Prize and leave you to enjoy their new artworks: A Very Short History of Tall Men by Vartan Avakian, Common Elements by Iman Issa, The Miraculous Lives of This and That by Huma Mulji, Background by Hrair Sarkissian and FIRE/ CAST/DRAW by Rayyane Tabet. This publication has been conceived by Murtaza Vali and designed by the New York based firm Project
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Projects. We are delighted to have commissioned in-depth essays from key voices focusing on the artists’ practice and their commission for the Abraaj Group Art Prize. Walid Sadek and Nat Muller on Vartan Avakian, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Iman Issa, Adnan Madani on Huma Mulji, Vali Mahlouji on Hrair Sarkissian and Haig Aivazian on Rayyane Tabet. We thank them for their scholarship and insight. I welcome you all to extra|ordinary: the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013.
Foreword
Savita Apte Chair Abraaj Group Art Prize
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Murtaza Vali
Essay
An extra | ordinary Introduction
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‘Ordinary’ is derived from the Latin ordo, meaning order. To be ordinary is to be a part of the natural order of things, to be normal, regular, routine, to display no special or distinguishing characteristics. Given this etymology it is hardly surprising that the incorporation of the ordinary and everyday into intellectual and artistic discourse began in earnest in the years following World War II. Obliterating any and all traces of prior order and routine, the war brought the banal and quotidian aspects of human life, usually overlooked and taken for granted, into stark relief. For the various thinkers and artists who championed a post-war recuperation of the ordinary, this strategy was not simply restorative, not a conservative return to lost order. Instead, the rupture of the war served as a reboot of sorts, priming everyday life for reevaluation and renewal. For philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, whose Critique of Everyday Life, first published in French in 1947, triumphantly declared the quotidian as a register worthy of theoretical and critical attention, this register, or “level” as he called it, was where the human condition was fully realised
and realisable: “The human world is not defined simply by the historical, by culture, by totality or society as a whole, or by ideological and political super-structures. It is defined by this intermediate and mediating level: everyday life.”1 For Lefebvre, and others who followed, the disruption provided an opportunity to refresh the status quo, creating a blank slate on which one could reimagine the potential of daily life, and through it work towards a better and more just future world. Routine would be reset and the ordinary and everyday would serve as the wellspring for subsequent social, political and artistic revolution.2 Additionally, the incorporation of specifically those aspects of life and culture traditionally deemed insignificant or unimportant by high art and elite culture seemed to be a truly egalitarian gesture; by emphasising the most common parts of human experience, post-war art and literature opened up to the broadest possible audience, bringing art one step closer to life.3 Working in places where the burden of history and politics is strongly felt and can be oppressively
1 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol 2: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore, Verso, London and New York, 2002, p. 45. 2 Lefebvre asserts, “it is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved, those creations
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which produce the human and which men produce as part of the process of becoming human: works of creativity.” ibid., p. 44. 3 Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1993, pp. 119-123.
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over-determined, where the certainties of daily life are far from certain, the five artists in ‘extra|ordinary’, like their avant-garde predecessors, seek out the wisdom of the routine, the less significant, and the easily overlooked. Though varied in subject matter and media, their works all spring forth from the rich bedrock of the ordinary, tapping into its democratic promise. They all draw on and occupy that minor register of culture, history, politics and contemporary life that encompasses not only the quotidian, but also the private, personal and domestic, the popular and vernacular, the lost and forgotten, and the ludic world of children. These works are not produced by heroic gestures of creation but through processes of gradual accumulation, through the meditative repetition of small acts of making and selecting, seeing and showing, a mode of production firmly grounded in the rhythms and spaces of daily life. Fragmented, wholes made up of many, often small, parts, these works emphasise—to borrow a turn of phrase Susan Sontag used to describe the unique dramatic logic of Samuel Beckett’s plays—“microstructure”, at the level of
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subject matter, process and form.4 Finally, they ask us to recalibrate our vision and attention, to lean in and get a better look, scour backgrounds, pay close attention to details, read all the fine print, allow the dense web of information and association embedded within to leisurely unfold. They do not strive to transform or transcend the ordinary. Instead, they humbly remind us of all that is extra in the ordinary itself.
Iman Issa works through a process of careful refinement, whereby specific information is pared down to its common essence and then re-imagined through a personal and subjective lens. Much of her recent work has applied this methodology to monuments and memorials, critiquing the formal and structural conventions of these public, collective commemorations. Common Elements (2013) adopts a similar approach towards the genre of autobiography. Primarily undertaken by those whose place in history is secure, the autobiography is a curiously hybrid
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4 Quoted in ibid., p. 120.
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genre, a performative and public retelling of personal narrative, a text where individual and collective are always already intertwined. Over a year and a half, Issa identified and extracted bits of text that felt somewhat familiar from five autobiographical accounts by four intellectuals. Fifty-four of these fragments, none more than a few sentences long, are presented individually, on framed panels; some are grouped into diptychs and triptychs. De-contextualised, the text fragments shed their specificities and blend together into a single collective account of the unique joys and hardships of a life dedicated to thought, culture and justice. Punctuating and amplifying the array of texts are fourteen colour photographs, primarily of things that could be treasured mementos but are eerily empty of personal traces, and five wooden sculptures, that resemble somewhat familiar objects but lack surface detail. These photographs and objects, allusive illustrations of the texts, are inspired by Issa’s memories of displays encountered during visits to a variety of museums, from those exhibiting art, archaeology
and photography to those dedicated to the military, the railway, science and agriculture. Like the texts, these images and objects hover uncertainly between the specific and the generic, questioning how exactly memories, experiences and histories, both individual and collective, come to reside in things. Like much of Issa’s oeuvre, Common Elements is driven by a desire to determine familiar structures of form, language, memory and experience where the individual intersects with and opens up into the collective, to develop a lexicon of the ordinary that is also abundant, that remains resolutely personal while capturing the richness of being human.
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Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Essay
Iman Issa’s Little Mysteries
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Iman Issa’s Common Elements (2013) consists of five wooden sculptures, fourteen colour photographs, and fifty-four panels of text reeling off statements, queries, platitudes, riddles and curious references to art, history, memory and photography. Several of the texts cut across the vague and generic quality of the other materials on view to hit upon the core of the artist’s meticulous and elusive practice, for which she not only reduces her visual language to its fullest and most essential forms but also greatly expands the potential for what a conceptual still life, a high-tech tableau or a twenty-first century take on memento mori can say or do. The fifty-four panels—ranging from “I’m a writer… Isn’t this miserable?” to “I would stamp on the ground several times and shriek: I will never marry, never, never, never”—are followed by a fifty-fifth, which delineates the varied sources that inspired this work. For two years straight, Issa has been burning through the autobiographies of major figures, reading about the public and private lives of leaders, rebels, revolutionaries, writers, despots, doctors, opposition figures and feminists as they reflect back on
the tumultuous times they lived through. In this same period, she has been seeking out dozens of minor museums devoted to subjects such as agriculture, textiles, transportation, folk art, military history, antiquity and war. Issa has never disclosed her sources before; now a list of names, titles and places is an integral part of the work. Knowing the wall texts are paraphrased passages from five books by four heavyweight Arab intellectuals— Taha Hussein, Mourid Barghouti, Nawal El Saadawi and Edward Said—is illuminating, sure. But it does nothing to explain the give-and-take of Issa’s process, which involves rounds of effacement and addition, subtraction and accumulation to create a language that communicates almost against all odds, and means something more for the effort. Perhaps, then, the more important factor is the movement from memory to history, from memoir to museum, which makes Common Elements both a logical continuation of Issa’s earlier projects and, arguably, the most sophisticated articulation of her enduring themes to date. Some of the texts in Common Elements seem closely related to the sculptures; the shape of a black
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wooden casket almost certainly echoes the command on one panel: “You can bury the coffin but one of you must sign a receipt first.” Others feel totally detached from the accompanying objects and images and, in some cases, even from other text fragments close by. Yet all of them are suggestive, strangely familiar, verging on archetypal: “He was loyal to his country, faithful to the woman who shared his bed.” Moreover, the texts gather intrigue and associative meaning in proximity to Issa’s pictures of a plate, a vase, rolls of paper, woven baskets, blank notebooks and small figurines of owls and cats and lions, among other precious, decorative things. “It is a scar on the ground. It is a scar on the sky” reads one panel. “But it is not a matter of aesthetics” reads another. “History was a street, a shop. It was in the sweets we ate, shoes we wore, schools we went to, in the plants and grass that grew on the walls, in the teenage fights that took place. It was in all of this and more” reads another still. “But it was never before a site where photographs are taken.” The devil, or at least the more interesting detective work that Issa has demanded of her viewers
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for a decade now, would appear to be in the details, in the provenance of a floral pattern, the origin of a leaf or the identity of a public statue whose context—the city, the architecture, the street life—we cannot see but are encouraged to imagine.1
Fifteen years ago, Iman Issa was a painter. She has never exhibited any of her work from that period and is not likely to share it anytime soon—in part because she does not consider it mature work, or work at all, just the outcome of student exercises and the idle things she did in her spare time. But it says something about the perspicacity of her practice that while she walked away from her last painting when she was around twenty-one years old, she does not rule out returning to the medium. She even considered picking up painting and drawing as possible solutions to the problems she posed for herself in Common Elements— among them, how to disentangle the multiple languages that functional objects in history museums seem to
1 Thirteen of the photographs for Common Elements are horizontal. The fourteenth is vertical, framing the statue of a standing figure from below against a gradated blue sky. The only other element one can see in the picture is the top of the supporting plinth. None of the surround ings are visible. One can’t
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help but wish that the artist had dropped her lens at least as low as the horizon line, if only to know if it would come to rest on a cityscape or the sea.
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speak, how to create illustrations capable of evoking familiar conversations, and how to make personal recollections comprehensible in a collective space. In the late 1990s, Issa was studying philosophy and political science at the American University in Cairo (AUC) when the school decided to set up an art department. Issa was one of a handful of students who signed up and switched majors. She studied photography not as fine art but in the context of journalism, communications and mass media. This period was marked by major shifts in the landscape of art in Cairo. In 1989, the state-run fine art sector had launched the Youth Salon, an annual juried exhibition for artists under the age of thirty. In 1995, the Egyptian pavilion at the Venice Biennale was filled, for the first time, with works by artists who did not belong to the old nationalist guard.2 The Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Espace Karim Francis and the Mashrabia Gallery all opened around that time and collaborated for a few years on the rowdy Nitaq Festival in downtown Cairo. Debates about cultural authenticity, economic development policies, corruption, cronyism,
2 For a discussion of the artists (Akram El Magdoub, Medhat Shafik and Hamdi Attia), the pavilion and the critical reception at home and abroad see Liliane Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art: 1910– 2003, American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 2005, pp. 187–195.
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Iman Issa with Chris Nagele, Spectacle for an Imaginary Audience, 2002 Light bulbs, painted wooden structure, 3 × 3 × 3.5 m Installation view
the autocracy of the state, repression, paranoia, and the use and abuse of political causes, created a rift between a bloated bureaucracy that put artists on the government’s payroll in return for their acquiescence and the so-called independent art scene emerging at the time. The latter was accused from the start of being elite and privileged, even as it nurtured work that was highly critical, politically aware, wildly experimental when it came to questions of form, and deeply engaged with the layered histories and lived experiences of the city. In those years, Issa drew up proposals for newspaper kiosks and bus stations, for the four-piece installation Meeting Point (2004). She printed fantastic postcards and placards for public buses as part of ‘Going Places’ (2003), an independent project by the curator Mai Abu ElDahab. She created a whole series of unrelated videos and installations that glittered and sparkled and glowed, such as Proposal for a Crystal Building (2003), a minimally bling-bling tower designed for Tahrir Square; Spectacle for an Imaginary Audience (2002), a roof-top hut kitted out in a neat grid of
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neon; the glimmering single-channel video Skyline (2006); and ‘Window Series’ (2007), a sequence of four photographs featuring enormous, ethereal jewels. At the same time, she made beautiful and intimate installations such as Lights (2002), which not only resembles Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Last Light) (1993), but also marks the start of Issa’s search for a similar visual language, in which tenuous connections, symbolic gestures and an extreme economy of phrasing shore up one’s art against absence, exile, and an immanent or already passing tragedy.
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* * * What does it mean that so many of Issa’s projects are proposals, and thus pitched to the future, when so much of her imagery involves objects carefully dislodged from but still tenuously connected to a deliberately ill-defined past? In 2007, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London asked twenty-six artists to create proposals for a memorial to the US-led war in Iraq.3 Of greater consequence than Issa’s actual
3 The resulting exhibition ‘Memorial to the Iraq War’, included an incredible piece by Jalal Toufic titled DualUse Memorial (2007), which was meant to involve checking out some thirty volumes from the British Library and mailing a book a day for the duration of the show to designated universities in Baghdad but changed dramatically when
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the British Library demanded the books back. Toufic still managed to revitalise both the Thousand and One Nights and the old adage: Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads.
4 Mai Abu ElDahab, ‘Five Questions about the Specific Concerns of Formal Ideas’, Mousse, no. 32, February/ March 2012, p. 179.
Untitled #4, 2007 Framed C-print 30 × 40 cm From ‘Window Series’ (2007)
contribution—a video on the extent to which images of contemporary warfare had lost their power and become clichéd—was the ways in which the experience changed her thinking on how a given or constructed language works. “Symbols have to address a collective through codes that require a common language and background, ones which would allow a viewer to decipher a meaning and message from the forms presented” she said in a recent interview. “This was extremely interesting…What was equally fascinating about symbols as utilized in monuments, memorials or even political banners was how emptied out they seemed to be in Egypt, prior to the events in Tahrir.”4 Like several of Issa’s previous bodies of work— such as the ten displays that make up the series of installations titled ‘Material’ (2010–12) or the six-part project known as ‘Triptych’ (2009)—Common Elements involves an exacting process of paring down and stripping away, a different kind of emptying out. Each piece in ‘Material’, which is described as a proposal for a sculpture designed to replace a public monument, pairs an object or a set of objects with a vinyl wall
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Lights, 2002 Coloured light bulbs, sound, wires, circuit Lights synced to soundtrack composed in collaboration with Brian Kuan Wood 6Ă—8m Installation view
text, which functions as both a subtitle and a bridge to Issa’s ideas. A squat, abstracted obelisk made of smooth, stained wood, for example, rests on its side on a rectangular white plinth next to the following phrase: Material for a sculpture representing a monument erected in the spirit of defiance of a larger power. A long glass display case filled with an older man’s possessions (cufflinks, a pocket watch, a wallet, two pencils and a pair of shoes, among other effects) is illuminated by the line Material for a sculpture commemorating an economist whose name now marks the streets and squares he once frequented. Or perhaps it is the objects that are meant to illustrate the texts, so that a pair of speakers nestled into a white wall, sounding out periodic bursts of static, describes Material for a sculpture acting as a testament to both a nation’s pioneering development and continuing decline and the long, shallow table holding just two spherically shaped, alternately dimming and shining lamps explains Material for a sculpture proposed as an alternative to a monument that had become an embarrassment to its people.
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All of the works in ‘Material’ are based on actual monuments that exist in the world (or once did), but Issa never explains where they are, what they memorialise, whom they honour or why they interest her. Knowing that she was born and raised in Cairo or hearing that the series is heavily based on memories from her childhood, one could try to guess the names of the characters embedded in the wall texts (the singer, the soldier, the blind man who became a great writer) or to map the locations that might be loosely related to the objects, such as the archival photograph of a lion or the graduation tassel looped over a small mahogany sculpture. But to do so would be to miss the point that all of the referred to monuments have failed somehow. The vision of their creators proved to be limited, their vocabulary inadequate. Times changed, politics shifted, and those grandiose gestures—a hero straddling a muscular horse on an implied battlefield, a leader ambling through an ever-changing city in a crumpled suit and an Ottoman-era fez—could no longer convey, much less sustain, their intended meaning. By peeling away all of the specificities and defining
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opposite Material for a sculpture representing a monument erected in the spirit of defiance of a larger power, 2010 Plywood sculpture, white plinth, vinyl text on wall From the series ‘Material’ (2010–2011) Installation detail
top Material for a sculpture commemorating an economist whose name now marks the streets and squares he once frequented, 2011 Vitrine with various objects, vinyl text on wall Vitrine: 156 × 58 × 215 cm From the series ‘Material’ (2010–11) Installation detail
bottom Material for a sculpture commemorating an economist whose name now marks the streets and squares he once frequented (detail), 2011 Vitrine with various objects, vinyl text on wall Vitrine: 156 × 58 × 215 cm From the series ‘Material’ (2010–11) Installation detail
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Material for a sculpture acting as a testament to both a nation’s pioneering development and continuing decline, 2011 Two black round speakers, 10 second soundtrack playing at 5 minute intervals, vinyl text on wall From the series ‘Material’ (2010–11) Installation view
details, Issa not only outlines that notion of failure and identifies it as a defection of language, a communication breakdown, meaning unmoored from its maker, she also begins to fill in the space she has cleared out with something else, with another language of words and forms. In the best and most utopian capacity of contemporary art, Issa’s blinking lights and folded brass forms and radically simplified pedestals could very well change the world (or alter the viewer’s perception of it) and make a difference—precisely by emphasising what is always and everywhere the same. After all, every country, and probably every city, too, has a singer, a soldier, and a blind man who was also a great writer. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, plays a similar game in his detective stories. “The action takes place in an oppressed yet stubborn country—Poland, Ireland, the republic of Venice, some South American or Balkan state” he writes in ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’.5 “The precise geography of the facts I am going to relate hardly matters” he explains at the outset of ‘The Man on the Threshold’.
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5 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’ in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, Penguin Classics, New York, 1998, p. 143.
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“And besides—what sort of exactness can the names Amritsar and Udh be expected to convey in Buenos Aires? I shall only say, then, that back in those years there were riots in a certain Muslim city, and that the central government sent a strong fellow in to impose order.”6 As if these stories were incomplete, Borges defends himself by saying that some of the details still need to be filled in, and that some of the plotlines are yet to be revealed to him. But those gaps remain and, in a way, as room for the reader or a commons, they are more important than the information for which they hold a place. “The things that are said in literature are always the same” Borges said in a 1966 interview. “What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example…. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential”.7 Lesser metaphors “strike no deep emotion whatever”.8 In Borges’ detective fiction, the crimes to be solved are usually clear to the reader, and most involve murder. In ‘The Man on the Threshold’ for example, the judge,
6 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Man on the Threshold’ in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley, Penguin Classics, New York, 1998, p. 269.
www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/4331/the-artof-fiction-no-39-jorge-luisborges, accessed February 10, 2013. 8 ibid.
7 Ronald Christ, ‘Jorge Luis Borges: The Art of Fiction’, The Paris Review, no. 40, Winter/Spring 1967, full text online, http://
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Glencairn, brought in to impose peace on the city disappears. Borges’ narrator, a mid-level detective, is sent to the far end of the empire to investigate. He encounters an old man who tells him an older story about another judge who antagonised his people until they rose up against him and killed him. “The past lives on in memory” the old man says. Realising the story describes events taking place not in the past but the present, the detective suddenly discovers a jubilant crowd, a man holding a bloodied sword, and Glencairn’s mutilated body: witnesses, weapon, perpetrator and victim. Issa’s mysteries have no such concrete actions or outcomes. Instead, they are pervaded by disturbance and disquiet, by the sense that something, somewhere, is not quite right, and perhaps no language exists to explain adequately what went wrong. In her installations, there is almost always a lingering absence—an elusive sense of loss, sadness, longing or sorrow—but there is rarely more than a hint of violence, conflict or crime. Again, there is something distinctively epic yet disturbingly common about the kinds of upheavals—war, famine, revolution,
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occupation, coup d’état—that tend to generate the grand public monuments, the memoirs of famous men and women, and the museums of historical moments that are among the artist’s most enduring subjects. Stories follow known forms, plus or minus the details. Issa’s Triptych #5, with its centrepiece—a large, framed, glossy colour photograph of two breakfast plates on either side of a chessboard—between a snapshot of a city park on its left and a metronome attached to a blinking light bulb on its right, seems unmistakable in its suggestion of a marriage, or a relationship, as an endless negotiation and a painfully intricate game. Triptych #4 includes a photograph of a desk with a typewriter, a stack of paper, a rack of blood samples, a table lamp and a potted plant alongside an image of streetlights, a ledger filled with seven thousand Cairo license plate numbers, a story about how “my sister, my cousin and myself” collected all of that data after reading too many detective stories in the summer of 1992—all of which combines to fire the imagination: a serial killer, a forensics lab, a rite of passage gone wrong and a season that changed
everything. Issa has said she composed the works for ‘Triptych’ in three parts and three phases so that she could approach the things she had made in an earlier phase as if they were the work of someone else.9 She has said that her interest in autobiography stems from the implication that the ‘I’ of the text is used for a higher purpose, as when the story of a man or woman is also and moreover the story of a country, a cause or an epoch. In all of this there is obviously an effacement of ego, and a desire to avoid the embarrassment of platitudes, confessions and clichés. Perhaps the art that comes, by necessity, after identity politics in a region where the discourse of cultural production is still somehow stuck on authenticity and imitation has to pare down on the personal dramas and individual details. Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011), a book of short fiction exhibited with an epilogue and an index as an installation of the same name10, and The Revolutionary (2010), a sound piece for which the artist fed a long string of sentences about a hero or villain, rebel or
9 Iman Issa, conversation with author, August, 2011. Reiterated in e-mail correspondence with author, January, 2013.
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10 The book itself has no images. The epilogue and the index that are part of the three-part installation consist of prints, videos, a table and chairs.
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Triptych #4, 2009 Two C-prints, text panel, notebooks Dimensions variable Installation view
despot, through text-to-speech software to generate a tinny and unnervingly disembodied speaking voice, are both unusual in Issa’s oeuvre, in that they contain no photographic images or sculptural objects. Like ‘Material’ and ‘Triptych’, however, they also contain virtually no place names or proper nouns, and very few adjectives. And still they tell stories we recognise, of friendship and betrayal, of disaster and renewal, of the refuge to be found in books, libraries and foreign lands. Likewise, there is a latent sense of drama in Illustrations for Future Narratives (2012), Issa’s installation of five video projections showing a pendulum, an abstract sculpture, vintage black and white photographs of Cairo and countless pretty images of a clear blue sky cropped out from the world below. Some sequences include photographic animations. Others play with time, slowing down the movements of a young girl’s face, for example, until it appears almost still. And while the photographs of Cairo appear to be of a long-gone era they were in fact all shot by Issa in 2009. While the story never quite emerges or sticks, it is endlessly poised to communicate, to make
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connections and draw upon familiar bodies of knowledge, experience, fantasy and fear. Forever adjusting the scale of the material against itself, and constantly cross-fading between the monumental and the mundane, between the ruptures of history and the intimacies of memory, all of these works hum with a deep, subtle intimation of violence that would be neither diminished nor broken apart by being named or specified.
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“Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions” writes Roberto Bolaño in the second section of his sprawling five-part novel 2666, as a melancholy Chilean professor restages an experiment originally designed by Marcel Duchamp against the backdrop of an unconscionable crime wave in Mexico. “They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with
no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story”.11 A shattering epic that tries to tackle history and touch its most unfathomable horrors, Bolaño’s brutal masterpiece was the last book he worked on before his premature death in 2003. In contrast, The Savage Detectives, his best loved and most widely read book, is a raucous and tender coming-of-age story about young poets with an incredible lust for life. The development of Issa’s practice from ‘Triptych’ to ‘Material’ to Common Elements follows an arc not unlike Bolaño’s—from working on memory and personal experience to grappling with events of far greater force and consequence. In her search for forms that adequately convey the hugeness of history but, at the same time, belong to a lineage of museums that habitually reduce history to small, manageable displays, Issa has come to share an elegant, stylised and highly volatile language with fellow Cairenes Hassan Khan and Basim Magdy, who also make ample use of refined, literary texts. Khan’s Insecure (2002) is a set of ten vinyl wall texts that instruct the viewer to “Wonder what you want from the person closest to you” or “List ten strategies
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11 Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2008, p. 189.
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you use to seduce others”. Magdy’s ruefully captioned photographs from the series ‘Every Subtle Gesture’ (2012) likewise hinge on the slightly sinister, pairing a lovely image of a fox, for example, with silver letterpress text that reads: “Time meant nothing but the slow decay of meaning”.12 That their works are collectively so neatly structured, so formalist and yet seething, does for the atrocities of our current authoritarian regimes what Bolaño, through his character Amalfitano’s feelings and ramblings, did for the horrors of his time. Issa says she was drawn, in part, to the five autobiographies behind Common Elements because of the statements of authorial intent that begin all of the books. Each writer announces his or her purpose, which is to sketch the outlines of one story as a means of accessing the rich, layered material of a larger, more complicated history, such as the British occupation of Egypt, the loss of Palestine, Israel’s staggering defeat of the Arab armies in 1967, the unlikely rise of feminism in a decidedly chauvinist milieu and the cycles of hope and failure that rumble through one revolution after another in Cairo. Yet each of these autobiographies
12 Thanks to the curator Mia Jankowicz, who made this connection clear in ‘More Out of Curiosity than Conviction’, the main exhibition of PhotoCairo 5 (2012).
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also begins with a calamity—Hussein’s riveting, third-person account of his blindness; Barghouti’s bittersweet return to Ramallah; El Saadawi’s forced exile from Egypt after sixty years of fighting to stay; Said’s determination to write about the places he has known when he is given what seems to be a fatal diagnosis of leukaemia. However, those, in fact, are details that Issa has brutally dropped. The reason, perhaps, is this: At a certain point, personal recollection has to give. An example surely known to Issa is the ways in which artists in Beirut have also neatly packaged memories and experiences of the civil war, something that has attracted great curatorial interest but has not always helped in encouraging the healthy functioning of a wrecked and divided society. The historian and journalist Samir Kassir once said of his purpose in writing an analytical history of the conflict: The war in Lebanon was a collection of fragments…My task was to sort out the fragments and then reconstruct from them a comprehensive
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image, an image as close as possible to the experiences of men and women who lived during the war. Yet I wanted this comprehensive image to be different from individual recollections or memories of the war…All those who lived through the war are entitled to have recollections, but they are not entitled to say anything about the war as a whole unless they adopt certain guidelines. To say something rational about the war, one has to work with the instruments of the historian, with rules and using a methodology. It is only under such conditions that the separate fragments of the war can be molded into a complete picture.13 Iman does not adopt the historian’s tools per se, but she does apply stringent rules and methodologies. Her language has its own grammar and syntax and generates meaning almost exclusively in reference to itself. She also intuits Kassir’s argument that individual recollections are insufficient for communicating universal experiences or collective memories. Where
13 Michael Young, ‘Writing the History of the Lebanese War: An Interview with Samir Kassir’, The Beirut Review, no. 8, Fall 1994, pp. 133–134.
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she goes beyond Kassir, however, is in the knowledge that history museums are often embedded with the atrocities committed by their subjects. That may be the ultimate endgame of Issa’s process of erasure and refinement—to make those objects speak what they know, but to do so without destroying them. There is also a strong kinship between Issa’s work and that of Haris Epaminonda and Céline Condorelli, who share her interests in structures of support and the delicate architecture of display. Epaminonda’s untitled installations for the series ‘Vol. IV’ (2009), for example, consist of objects similar to those in Issa’s photographs for Common Elements—statuettes, figurines, textiles, bowls and other functional objects with an ethnographic bent. Yet the poetry of Epaminonda’s project comes from her plinths and supports, from the way she wraps a tiny frame around a column in a gallery as if her intervention were an embrace. Condorelli’s ‘Support Structures’, a long-term collaboration with Gavin Wade, takes an architectural approach to similar subjects, creating alternatives to the seemingly incidental objects and unseen systems that prop up,
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bolster, hold, frame, carry, bear or sustain things such as books, documents and artefacts. Considering these artists together one realises that many of their works are in fact quite small, toy-sized, childlike. Here, the literary capacity of Issa’s work is not only a matter of language, communication and skill. It is a capacity for imagination, and for wonder. After calamity, atrocity, horrors and the rigorous but restorative rules of history, there is still, in small things, in the quickened plot of the shortest story or the line and grain of a seemingly incidental object, that strange capacity left to wonder. In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart suggests that the worlds of literature and miniatures were intertwined because “the invention of printing coincided with the invention of childhood”. Like children’s stories, miniatures “presented an infinite and fabulous world which had the capacity to absorb the child’s sense of reality. The miniature… became the realm not of fact but of reverie”.14 This may be the realm created by Common Elements, where
14 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993, p. 43.
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a wooden book stand, a photograph of an art deco sculpture of a cat appearing to paw a green leaf, or a close-cropped image of a stone lion’s muscular shoulder, combine to instigate the imagination, and with it, a dream of a different future.
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They are killing horses, isn’t that right?
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I am a writer, which means I don’t do anything. Isn’t that miserable?
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But they are killing horses, isn’t that right?
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He despised hypocrisy and attempts to gain power at the expense of dignity, self-respect, and the right to voice opinions.
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I used to go from library to library looking for books I could not find, but now they were all at the tips of my fingers.
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Are you a Russian doctor?
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No, I am an Arab doctor.
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Books were arranged behind glass windows. There were hundreds of volumes, hundreds of titles, hundreds of authors, amongst which I read the name of our great author.
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I would stamp on the ground several times and shriek, ‘I will never marry. Never, never, never.’
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The fortune teller was a blind woman but she could read the future.
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It was a blue sky. They call it Carolina Blue.
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He started to discuss the different Semitic languages in a comparative manner. He was a linguistics professor.
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Houses on the mountains, houses on my mind, houses I entered in my childhood, houses whose locations I do not recall.
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The first pioneers of women’s education graduated from here.
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You can bury the coffin but one of you must sign a receipt first.
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The grapes here are extremely good.
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‘Do you know how they determine the distance of stars from earth?’ ‘Oh, it’s easily done. You take a fixed point on earth, deduce the angle, then calculate the distance,’ the philosopher replied.
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Words might shake history but they certainly do not protect geography.
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I bent down quickly, trying to hide my face as I picked up the book. I avoided looking at her, for I knew her ability to sense things was more acute than all five senses combined.
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They are destroying souvenirs, paintings, curtains, and chairs.
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Only once did my father explain the general national condition when he said about their family: ‘They lost everything.’ A moment later he added: ‘We lost everything too.’
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In the future we will have a collective memory identical to the individual’s memory. It will be as if what happened to one, happened to all.
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He believed in this. Moreover he believed that thinkers, scientists, and writers were not going to join political camps. It took him only a few months in the country to realize that he was mistaken, and that thinkers, scientists, and writers were all joining political camps.
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It is a scar on the ground. It is a scar on the sky.
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But it is not a matter of aesthetics.
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‘What is happening inside?’ ‘Their usual questions; silly questions.’
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‘What shall I cook tonight?’ my mother would ask. ‘Sweet potato casserole,’ I would quickly answer.
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He called it telepathy: the ability to sense those who are far away.
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Departure is the state of being abandoned even though it is you who leave.
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Iman Issa, Common Elements (details), 2013 55 text panels, 14 framed C-prints and 5 wood sculptures on painted wood plinths Dimensions variable
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Iman Issa in conversation with Murtaza Vali
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Murtaza Vali Words like ‘subtraction’, ‘reduction’, and ‘distillation’ come to mind upon encountering your work. It has a highly refined feel that is achieved through a rigorous and radical process of abstraction that is not merely formal but also semiotic, that seems to pare down both visual and linguistic signs to the bare minimum needed to still signify. What motivates this approach? What is at stake? What do you think is gained by losing so much?
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Iman Issa I acknowledge that it might be appropriate to describe my work as involving a certain level of abstraction in so far as a rectangle might signify a building, a circle a person’s head, or a line a piece of text. However, I rarely think of what I do as a process of subtraction. It is, rather, about generating forms that are capable of delivering a desired meaning or concept. Sometimes a geometric shape strikes me as more successful in evoking the idea of a particular building, person, or event than the proper name or a colour photograph of that building, person
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or event might be. But this process is not strictly about abstraction either. It could also be a matter of simple displacement, like showing a picture of a chair with the aim of speaking about a specific table, or changing a colour in an image or using a particular angle or perspective over another to shoot an object. The aim with these strategies is the identification of a language with which to communicate, and it is in that sense that an image, word, or three-dimensional form, are all similar as the constitutive elements of a possible language, even if each is inherently structurally different.
That would be an easy answer, one that does not satisfy completely, especially as I do not think propaganda was instrumental to the ruling system in Egypt prior to the ongoing revolution. That system, if anything, seemed to have been moving in the direction of becoming more and
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Is this reticence towards specificity or certainty of meaning a response to the fact that, until recently, symbols and language, both visual and textual, were co-opted by power as propaganda tools in Egypt?
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Untitled Poster #4, 2010 Framed archival inkjet print 68.5 × 48 cm From the series ‘Colors, Lines Numbers, Symbols, Shapes, and Images’ (2010)
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more transparently corrupt. So I guess I would put it somewhat differently: that a reticence in utilising certain forms is not the result of them being coopted by a central power but the result of a subjective experience, of an inability to generate a desired meaning through forms one expects to be appropriate for such a task, as well as being confronted by forms that do not seem to correspond to a specific meaning. In my experience this phenomenon is not limited to a geographical location. Why this is the case is an interesting question for me but for which I have yet to find an answer.
I have been interested in monuments and memorials for quite some time now, but it was after I was commissioned to produce a work for the 2007 exhibition ‘Memorial to the Iraq War’ at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
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Monuments and memorials have been the subject of much of your recent work, like your series ‘Material’ (2010–2011). What interests you about these public and collective forms of memory-work and what is your approach to them?
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London that I started to think of monuments and memorials as potentially adequate vehicles for communication. Before then, I approached monuments and memorials as structures that did something in the collective or public space, something which perhaps needed to be critiqued or understood better. But it was through the process of conceiving a work for that exhibition that I became more interested in the capacity of monuments to actually recall their subject matter; that is, in the ability of the statue to speak about the man it is ostensibly commemorating, or the war museum of the event it is recording. It took a few years of looking at monuments and memorials after that to realise that there is indeed something very interesting about the symbolic quality and abstracting tendencies typically associated with their language, something which I was coming to increasingly view as a constructive method of communication. This is what laid the ground for ‘Material’, which I started in late 2009 and completed in early 2012. The works in ‘Material’, which are all based on existing monuments, are presented as propositional. What do
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I have recognised, for quite some time, that as an artist working here and now I find it very difficult to speak of things without bracketing them as a subjective experience of some sort. I feel a constant need to incorporate in the very form of the work I produce a doubt that what I am expressing, feeling, or observing is shared beyond my own experience. It was the awareness of this dynamic that made me want to try and look for examples of creative endeavours where this wasn’t the case, examples where artists took it upon themselves to offer a personal vision for collective use. Of course, what form claims to speak of, for and about a collective more clearly than a public monument or memorial? So, in a way, working on ‘Material’ allowed me to inhabit a position that I normally did not identify with. It is perhaps because of this that I found it necessary to present the displays of that work in the form of models as opposed to finished structures. It was to reflect on the very gesture of conceiving these structures
Proposal for an Iraq War Memorial, 2007 Single-channel video, colour, 5 minutes
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you like about this mode of working, of presenting a potential rather than realised form, structure or solution?
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Material for a sculpture recalling the destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance, 2010 Mahogany sculpture with black tassel, white plinth, vinyl text on wall From the series ‘Material’ (2010–2011) Installation detail
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as well as to highlight the formal qualities they had as something that is potentially subject to change.
My interest in autobiography grew out of some of the questions projects like ‘Material’, ‘Triptych’ (2009), and Thirty-three stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011) opened up. In all of these projects I relied on memory in the generation of forms, but always with the aim of communicating to a potential viewer. And, of course, this approach opened up the question of how one guarantees communication when the method relied on is as subjective and inaccessible as one’s memory?
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Common Elements (2013), a dense installation of text panels, photographs and sculptures, draws on autobiographical texts by four Arab intellectuals. Primarily undertaken by those whose place in history is secure, the autobiography is a curiously hybrid genre, a performative public retelling of a personal narrative, a text where the individual and collective are already intertwined. Did this source material require a distinct strategy? How did you approach it?
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So it is this question, coupled with the feeling that I could not come up with means other than my own memories and associations to speak about familiar places, things, characters and events, that drove me to look at autobiographies. Autobiographies, even memoirs for that matter, struck me as forms which embody the humility of speaking only for oneself, while retaining the implication that what is being communicated has a much wider relevance. This is a story of this woman or man but it is also the story of a specific war, event, place, culture, historical moment or it is an expression of a shared sentiment such as resistance, displacement, nationalism, racism, sexism, prejudice or other human experiences. So, I started reading various autobiographies with the aim of trying to understand how the very form of these texts communicated this dynamic. In the end I identified five books that I knew I wanted to work with. I then went through these books carefully, line by line, sentence by sentence, and word by word, looking for instances where I believed a personal narrative became something more, instances where the constellation of words used by the writer spoke of something that I identified as familiar.
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opposite Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places, 2011 Various media Dimensions variable Installation view
above Triptych #6, 2009 C-prints, framed text panel Dimensions variable Installation view
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I started to collect these excerpts. The whole process took over a year and a half, at the end of which I had collected about one hundred and fifty pages of text and it is from these excerpts that I formed the text panels of Common Elements.
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Museums and museology were also important points of reference for Common Elements. In your mind, what is the relationship between museums and autobiographies?
This relationship between autobiographies and museum displays, or at least the question of this relationship, came from the work itself. I knew I wanted to use the material I collected from these autobiographies to come up with additional elements that would act as a visual representation of this material. First I thought I would do this through a selection of photographs I had shot over the years. Then I thought I might construct settings based on descriptions I encountered in the books and use images of these alongside the text. I struggled with such ideas for over a year and was unable to come up with a single image
that worked. That is, I was unable to come up with a single visual representation that I believed adequately evoked these elements I had identified as familiar. All through this period I was doing what I always do, visiting a large number of museums, some of modern and contemporary art but also museums of antiquities, history, textiles, ceramics, portraiture, photography, museums that detailed the evolution of a scientific field, or a national industry, that told the story of a war, a city, or region, museums of geological discoveries, of religion, of religious artefacts, of royal and personal belongings turned history, and many more. And it was in these spaces that I started to encounter elements that struck me as familiar, or to be more accurate, that struck me as adequate for speaking about the experiences and sentiments I had recognised in the books. And this had little to do with whether an element was three or three thousand years old. Time, source, context, cultural significance and location were all irrelevant. Although none of the images or sculptures in Common Elements are directly based on museum pieces, I believe they were inspired by the displays I encountered in these museums, if on a less than conscious level. I never
Iman Issa, Lexicon-ongoing (Missing Detail 3), 2011 Video still Part of Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011) Installation detail
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revisited any of these displays when I began constructing my photographs or sculptures. I do not even possess a recognisable mental record of them. Perhaps the best way to describe the photographic and sculptural works in Common Elements is that they were based on a feeling of this other material I encountered in museums, yet for which I have neither a clear image nor a traceable recollection.
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For me, the photographs and sculptures present uncertain objects, comparable in their ambiguity to autobiographies. They seem to hover somewhere between being ordinary artefacts and personal mementos and bring up complicated questions of how memories, experiences, emotions and even histories comes to reside in things, and whether this process does or does not transform if and how these objects are able to communicate with others. Is this a fair analysis? Are these objects analogous to monuments and memorials in previous work in that they serve as pivots between subjective experience and collective knowledge?
I am not really sure about the exact manner in which these photographs or objects communicate. With ‘Material’, it was clear to me that I was relying heavily on a symbolic language in order to communicate. But I do not know what I am relying on in this project. Is it the implied function or possible use of these elements that is being evoked? Or is it the shape, colour, design, implicit narrative or symbolic dimension of them as forms that renders them familiar? It is clear to me that as elements they do indeed speak, and sometimes I know what they are saying, but how they say it is a question I have yet to find an answer for. This was a question that also came up during my visits to the aforementioned museums. In these museums, I was unable to identify a discernible distinction between the presentation of ‘artworks’ and the presentation of elements that would be considered more as artefacts, or illustrations of a given narrative. In many of these museums, it was common to find a drawing, painting, or sculpture comfortably placed next to a bracelet, a map, a cup, and a colourful piece of fabric, all of them presented as having something in common. I believe that the connection that ties these elements
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together is what I am trying to identify, understand and possibly emulate with the photographs and sculptures in this project.Â
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Could Common Elements be read as a memorial to the Arab intellectual, a figure always under threat of erasure, a monument to the unique joys and hardships of an Arab life dedicated to the pursuit of culture, knowledge and justice?
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I am not sure what you mean when you say the Arab intellectual is a figure always under threat of erasure, but I can tell you that in researching this project I spent a couple of years reading all sorts of autobiographies, not exclusively those of Arabs. In all the books I was searching for instances where I recognised the personal narratives I encountered as speaking of a familiar experience, place, value system, or event. The fact that in the end I chose autobiographies that were indeed of Arab figures, moreover of ones who spent time in my home city, is interesting to me, even though I am not sure I know exactly what it implies.
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As to your question about whether this work could be read as a memorial of some sort, I can tell you that on a more conscious level and while working with these books, I became interested in the positions and struggles these four particular figures represented; positions and struggles that I feel are worthwhile but for which a clear path forward is not evident, at least not to me. However, it is important to note that this interest and awareness only emerged retroactively, after I had already chosen these autobiographies, and started working with them on a more engaged level. It was also always coupled with a feeling that it was possible to find other examples of such positions and struggles. In a way, even though I developed a deep connection to these five books, I always felt they were interchangeable with other books out there, and that if I searched more I would find different ones that would work just as well for my purposes.
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Iman Issa Born 1979 Cairo, Egypt Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt and New York, U.S.A. EDUCATION 2007 MFA, Columbia University, New York, U.S.A. 2001 BFA, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2012 Material, Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada 2011 Material, Rodeo, Istanbul, Turkey 2010 Triptychs, Artissima 17: Present Future, Turin, Italy Subjective Projections, Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany 2008 Making Places, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, Egypt 2003 Proposal for a Crystal Building, Gezira Arts Center, Cairo, Egypt 2002 Lights, Gezira Arts Center, Cairo, Egypt SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2012 PhotoCairo 5, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo Tea with Nefertiti, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar A Permanent Record For Future Investigation, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, U.A.E. Material Information, Permanenten Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Bergen, Norway
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The Petrified River, Lukas Feichtner Galerie, Vienna, Austria All That Shines Ain’t No Gold, Rodeo, Istanbul, Turkey UNREST: Revolt Against Reason, apexart, New York, U.S.A. Ruptures: Forms of Public Address, The Cooper Union, New York, U.S.A. The Political is Collective–Factions, Art Hall Passagen, Linköping, Sweden When It Stops Dripping from the Ceiling, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France Remainder, Hilary Crisp, London, U.K. Bucharest Biennale 5, various venues, Bucharest, Romania The Ungovernables: The 2012 New Museum Triennial, New Museum, New York, U.S.A. Screening Part 1, West Street Gallery, New York, U.S.A. Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden 2011 Constellation, Rodeo, Istanbul, Turkey Seeing is believing, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany Short Stories, Part One: Iman Issa and Ben Schumacher, SculptureCenter, New York, U.S.A. Propaganda by Monuments, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt The MENASA Studio Dispatches, Art Dubai, Dubai, U.A.E. 2010 The Night of Future Past, Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, various venues, Toronto, Canada Dwelling in Travel, Center for Contemporary Art–The Ancient Bath, Plovdiv, Bulgaria Can Altay - Iman Issa, Rodeo, Istanbul, Turkey A New Formalism, Art Dubai, Dubai, U.A.E.
Apart, we are together: Adelaide International 2010, Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, Australia Why Not, Palace of Arts, Cairo, Egypt 2009 Total Recall/Totale Erinnerung: 3. Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg, Alter Meβplatz Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Reenacted Decade, Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo, Norway 2008 Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions: The 7th Gwangju Biennale, various venues, Gwangju, South Korea Cairoscape: Images, Imagination and Imaginary of a Contemporary Mega City, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; Cultural Center of the City of Athens, Athens, Greece Summer Screen, Spacex, Exeter, U.K. Self Storage, The Hardware Store Gallery, San Francisco, U.S.A. Look Around, Artericambi, Verona, Italy 2007 Memorial to the Iraq War, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, U.K. 2006 Philip, Project Arts Center, Dublin, Ireland 2005 PhotoCairo 3, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt 2004 Mediterraneo, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, Italy 2003 Going Places: A Project for Public Buses, Cairo, Egypt
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Open Studio, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, Egypt Wasla Contemporary Art Workshop, Nuweiba, Egypt 2002 Dar El-Hiwar, Goethe Institute, Cairo, Egypt 2001 The Opening, Falaki Gallery, Cairo, Egypt SCREENINGS 2012 A State of Fluidity, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Transmediale, Berlin, Germany 2011 Arab Shorts, Goethe-Institut, Cairo, Egypt 2009 Past of the Coming Days: Sharjah Biennial 9, various venues, Sharjah, U.A.E. 3rd Riwaq Biennale: A Geography: 50 Villages, various venues, Palestine Cairoscape: Images, Imagination and Imaginary of a Contemporary Mega City, Museo Internazionale della Musica di Bologna, Bologna, Italy She doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the h-bomb, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia 2008 She doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the h-bomb, tank.tv, Tate Modern, London Still Cinema 5: Heysa!, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, U.K. Heysa!, Bidoun Cinema and Video Lounge, Art Dubai, U.A.E. 2007 Bidoun Programme, Video Booth as the Bloomberg Bidoun Lounge, DIFC Gulf Art Fair, Dubai, U.A.E.
2006 Conscious in Coma, Goethe Institut, Istanbul, Turkey EXHIBITION CATALOGUES AND BOOKS 2012 Joo, Eungie and Ryan Inouye (eds), The Ungovernables: The 2012 New Museum Triennial. Skira Rizzoli, in association with New Museum, New York. 2011 El Baroni, Bassam (ed.), Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou. Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Alexandria. Butcher, Clare and Mia Jankowicz (eds.), Propaganda by Monuments. Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo. 2010 Lynn, Victoria (ed.), Apart, we are together: Adelaide International 2010. Adelaide Festival Corporation, Adelaide. 2009 Cornell, Lauren, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman (eds), Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory. Phaidon Press, London; New Museum, New York. Enwezor, Okwui and Chika Okeke-Agulu (eds), Contemporary African Art Since 1980. Damiani, Bologna. Sorbello, Marina and Antje Weitzel (eds), Cairoscape: Images, Imagination and Imaginary of a Contemporary Mega City. argobooks, Berlin. Abou El Fetouh, Tarek et. al. (eds), Past of the Coming Days: Sharjah Biennial 9. Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah. El Baroni, Bassam and HelgaMarie Nordby (eds), Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Reenacted Decade. Unge Kunstneres Samfund, Oslo.
2008 Enwezor, Okwui (ed.), Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions: The 7th Gwangju Biennale. Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Gwangju. 2003 Abu ElDahab, Mai (ed.), Wasla Contemporary Art Workshop. Wasla Contemporary Art Workshop, Cairo. 2002 Dar-el-Hiwar, Goethe Institute, Cairo. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 2012 Abu ElDahab, Mai ‘Five Questions about the Specific Concerns of Formal Ideas’. Mousse, no. 32, February/ March, pp. 178-183. Archey, Karen “Moving Up: Liden/Issa/Slavs and Tartars/ Macuga/Mauss’. Leap, no. 14, April. Chou, Kimberly ‘Local Talent Leads Downtown Triennial’. The Wall Street Journal, February 10. Cotter, Suzanne ‘The Ungovernables/New Museum, New York’. Artforum, vol. 50, no. 9, May, pp. 300-301. Hoskote, Ranjit ‘Master Takes: Ranjit Hoskote On Art’. Tehelka, vol. 9, no. 18, May 5. Jankowicz, Mia and Constanze Wicke ‘Forum: Only Reflections of a Society in Change’. Camera Austria International, no. 118, Summer, pp. 55-70. Lind, Maria ‘Now Hear This: Learning from memorials’. ArtReview, no. 59, May, pp. 48-49. Rifky, Sarah ‘Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou’. Bidoun, no. 26, Spring, pp. 132-133. Schwarzbart, Judith ‘Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies/Tensta Konsthall, Tensta’. art agenda, April 3, http://www.art-agenda.com/ reviews/abstract-possiblethe-stockholm-synergies/.
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Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen ‘Bucharest Biennale 5/Various Venues’. Artforum, vol. 51, no. 2, October, pp. 285-286. Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen ‘Iman Issa: Radical Subtraction’. Bidoun, no. 26, Spring, pp. 18-21. Vogel, Wendy ‘New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables’. Flash Art, no. 284, May/June, p. 36. 2011 Boucher, Brian ‘Memorial ‘Material’: Q+A With Iman Issa’. Artinamericamagazine. com, September 29, http:// www.artinamericamagazine. com/news-opinion/ conversations/2011-09-29/ iman-issa/. Elwakil, Mai ‘Propaganda by Monuments: Art and revolution’. Egypt Independent/ Al Masry Al Youm English Edition, March 28. Jankowicz, Mia ‘Iman Issa/ Rodeo, Istanbul’. Frieze, no. 143, November/December, pp. 153-154. Rosenmeyer, Aoife ‘Emerging: Iman Issa’. MAP Magazine, no. 25, Summer, pp. 28-29. Stuhr-Rommereim, Helen ‘Artist Iman Issa searches for the familiar’. Egypt Independent/Al Masry Al Youm English Edition, August 2. Stuhr-Rommereim, Helen ‘Photography: Pushing the boundaries of a locally nascent medium’. Egypt Independent/Al Masry Al Youm English Edition, July 18. 2010 Gray, Maggie ‘Can Altay Iman Issa’. this is tomorrow, June 1, http:// www.thisistomorrow. info/viewArticle. px?artId=360&Title=Can%20 Altay%20-%20Iman%20Issa. Kemp, Jemima ‘Apart, we are together: Adelaide International 2010’. Art Monthly Australia, no. 231, July, pp. 10-12.
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Quilty, Jim ‘Let’s try having an argument. About art’. The Daily Star, March 27. 2008 Davies, Clare ‘Critic’s Picks: Iman Issa/Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art’. Artforum.com, January 21, http://www.artforum.com/ archive/id=19311. Hamdy, Mariam ‘Scenes from the City’. Daily News Egypt, January 11. 2007 Allsop, Laura ‘Memorial to the Iraq War’. ArtReview, no. 14, September, p. 121. Lindey, Christine ‘Iraq war: A vital theme’. Morning Star, June 4. 2006 Azimi, Negar ‘Iman Issa: Make of it what you want’. Bidoun, no. 7, Spring/Summer, p. 24. 2005 Abu ElDahab, Mai ‘Iman Issa’. Metropolis M, no. 3, June/July. 2003 Abu ElDahab, Mai ‘Going Places: A Project for Public Buses’. Bidoun 0, Spring, pp. 21-26. Ramadan, Dina ‘Remote Connection: Wasla Contemporary Art Workshop’. Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 18, Spring/Summer, p. 103. Rifky, Sarah ‘Crystal Proposal’. Cairo Times, October 2-8. 2002 Khan, Hassan ‘Bright Lights’. Cairo Times, May 2-8. Ramadan, Dina ‘Abnormal Normality’. Cairo Times, December 19-25. ARTIST PROJECTS/ WRITINGS 2012 ‘Paranoid City’ and ‘When Fox Becomes Polar Bear’. The Ungovernables: The 2012 New Museum Triennial. Eds.
Eungie Joo and Ryan Inouye. Skira Rizolli, in association with New Museum, New York, pp. 44-47. 2011 Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places. SculptureCenter, New York; Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, Beirut. 2009 ‘Paranoid City’. Cairo Resilience: The City as Personal Practice. Eds. Shahira Issa and Dina K. Shehayeb. International Architecture Biennial Rotterdam, Rotterdam. 2007 ‘A City in 10 Images’. Bidoun, no. 12, Fall, n.p.
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Writer’s Biography Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a writer and critic based in Beirut. A contributing editor for Bidoun, she writes regularly for Artforum, pens a column for Frieze, and covers contemporary art and culture for the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star. She has written essays for journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogues on subjects ranging from video art, experimental music and public space in post-war Beirut to the work of Rabih Mroué, Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari. She has led writing workshops and organised video programmes for Bidoun Projects and is currently teaching criticism in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut and working on a series of essays commissioned by the Bohen Foundation on funding and other forms of support for contemporary art in the Middle East.
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ex tr a Acknowledgements Iman would like to thank: Laura Egerton, Mayssa Fattouh, Julie Fuchs, Shahira Issa, Brian Kuan Wood, Sarah Rifky, Rodeo Gallery, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie and Murtaza Vali.
Murtaza would like to thank: Laura Egerton, the heart and engine of the Abraaj Group Art Prize, without whose good humour and tireless effort the realisation of this book, and the exhibition it accompanies, would have been impossible; Iman Issa, my collaborator on this project, for generously sharing her work, time, ideas and creative process; Kaelen Wilson-Goldie for a lovely essay that enriches Iman’s already rich project in wonderfully unexpected ways; Savita Apte, Chair of the Selection Committee, Abraaj Group Art Prize, FrÊderic Sicre, Partner, Abraaj Group, Antonia Carver, Director, Art Dubai, and the rest of the 2013 Abraaj Group Art Prize Selection Committee: Dana Farouki, Glenn Lowry, Salwa Mikdadi, Jessica Morgan, Nat Muller, Elaine Ng and Julia Peyton-Jones; Prem Krishnamurthy, Adam Michaels, Aileen Kwun and Kim Sutherland of Project Projects for their thoughtful design of the object you are currently holding and their flexibility and patience; Hassan Khan and Basim Magdy for providing images of their work; Jaret Vadera for his constant, warm and thoughtful support; Sipokazi Cetu-Quick for her invaluable assistance with childcare; Uzma Rizvi, truly my partner in life, who gracefully and silently bore the burden of my half of our life together during the months I dedicated to this project; my daughter, Zainab Sophia, whose joyful presence provided both much needed distractions and reality checks; and, finally, my family, Shakir, Nargis and Fatema Vali, and Hussain Kutiyanawala, for grieving and persevering with me. This book is dedicated to my brother Mustafa, who left us too soon but taught me the simple wisdom of always dreaming beyond.
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Photography Credits Listed by page number: 25, 27, 28, 30-32, 38, 100, 102, 104, 106-108: Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, Istanbul; 50-94: Courtesy the artist.
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extra|ordinary is published on the occasion of The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, exhibition at Art Dubai, Madinat Jumeirah, Dubai, March 20-23, 2013. Copyright © 2013. The Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, Murtaza Vali (Curator), and the Artists. Texts. Copyright © 2013. Murtaza Vali (Editor) and the Authors. All works by Vartan Avakian, Iman Issa, Huma Mulji, Hrair Sarkissian, and Rayyane Tabet. Copyright © 2013. The Artists. © The photographs in this publication have been provided by the artists whose work is represented and The Abraaj Group Art Prize. Exceptions are indicated directly in the image captions/photo credits. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from The Abraaj Group Art Prize and the respective authors. Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. If proper acknowledgement has not been made we ask copyright holders to contact the publishers. ISBN: 978-9948-444-77-0 Editor: Murtaza Vali Essays: Haig Aivazian, Adnan Madani, Vali Mahlouji, Nat Muller, Walid Sadek, and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie Interviews: Murtaza Vali Editorial advisor on behalf of Abraaj: Laura Egerton Copyediting: Murtaza Vali Proofreading: Murtaza Vali, Laura Egerton Book design: Project Projects, New York Printed by Emirates Printing Press, Dubai Typeset in Executive and Freight