Iman Issa
Heritage Studies #23

Artist
Iman Issa

Title
Heritage Studies #23

Year of creation
2016

Technique and dimensions
brass, wood, lacquer, plotted text, 141 x 127 cm

Year of acquisition
2023

Donor
gift from Jason Jiang to the Friends of the National Gallery Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Acquisition of the foundation

Iman Issa examines the relationship between history, language and object in various series of works.
The sculptures in the “Heritage Studies” series, which have been created since 2015, go back to the artist's visits to encyclopedic museums, during which she made sketches and notes on individual artifacts. She is particularly interested in the attributions and explanations that accompany historical objects. Based on this research, abstract sculptures are created whose form is sometimes more, sometimes less reminiscent of the object that inspired the artist to reinterpret it. They are accompanied by a text that takes up museum conventions of labeling and classifying artifacts and at the same time questions them by interweaving historical facts and fictional attributions. In the case of “Heritage Studies #23,” the artist, who was born in Cairo and lives in Berlin, refers to an ancient Egyptian commemorative scarab. Memory and invention work together in the cosmos created by Issa, a heritage spanning different times and cultural areas. - Gabriele Knapstein