Iman Issa

Because anything that casts a shadow can be a clock, Iman Issa’s solo presentation on the Art Institute of Chicago’s open-air terrace, “A Game, or So You May Think,” brought the passage of time to mind. Though it had rained earlier on the morning I visited the exhibition, the sun shone brightly on the artist’s enigmatic geometric sculptures—many of which featured highly reflective surfaces wrought from aluminum, copper, and brass—creating stark, powerful shadows. Rainwater pooled darkly on the concrete around the dazzling objects, and, with more storms forecast, the mercurial nature of their appearance was as significant as the resilience of the works’ materials. 

The sun was so strong I had the sensation that I was watching rainwater evaporate off the artist’s gleaming forms. Were they hot to the touch? I presume so, but numerous signs forbidding visitors from placing their hands on the art prevented me from confirming. Such warnings, however, couldn’t keep me from longing to feel Issa’s surprisingly sensuous Minimalist pieces. Particularly compelling was Heritage Studies #46 (all works cited, 2023),featuring a javelin-like object displayed on a sharply angled plinth as though it were a missile ready for launch. The “projectile,” made of radiant brown copper on one end and oxidized copper on the other (its turquoise coloring richer than that of the Statue of Liberty), looked simultaneously ancient and futuristic, sporty and martial. Industrial threading seemed to bind its two parts together, as if each component had been harvested from something else entirely and joined here for some unknown function. Nearby was Heritage Studies #42, an alluring fragment of brass checkerboard floor (à la Carl Andre) that reflected the clouds above. Curiously rolled up like a scroll on its eastern end, the piece dared us to step on it.

“A Game, or So You May Think” was the latest iteration—and the largest exhibition to date—of Issa’s ongoing “Heritage Studies” series, begun in 2015. Each of the seven pieces on view was accompanied by a wall text etched onto a stainless-steel panel. But instead of being explanatory, these didactics were part of the objects’ material and conceptual makeup; each plate identified an institution and an ancient artifact from its collection (such as a vessel, a fragment of tile, or an architectural remnant), from which Issa derived inspiration for her sculptures. The conceit suggested that the artist studied each of her sources in situ and tapped into something formal (or even spiritual) about them for her own works—or so you may think, as the exhibition title prompted. 

Yet there’s something disquieting about Issa’s “game.” The institutions named, often without geographical reference—including the International Museum of World Arts and Culture Collection, the Universal Museum of Ancient Art Collection, and the National Museum of Global Arts Collection—were so blandly nondescript, and gestured so slyly toward critiquing the role of universal museums and their colonialist histories, that they estranged rather than clarified any foundational object. This approach sent me into a giddy loop wondering if these places existed at all, and, if they didn’t, what about the items described, albeit vaguely, therein? The wall text that accompanied Heritage Studies #43—another spare, tiled floor sculpture, this one involuted on its northern edge—read: “Floor with Mathematical Tablet Featuring diagrams detailing a number of geometrical problems in architecture that are yet to be solved.”

When I finally admitted to myself that I would have rather engaged that fascinating tablet, dated 1800 BCE in Issa’s didactic, than the minimal fragment before me, the game was at its very best. Standing among the artist’s elegant shining objects, each so distant from any meaning its apparent inspiration may have held (if it held any meaning at all—that is, if these texts weren’t, in fact, fictions), I began to feel an overwhelming emptiness. The language of Issa’s descriptions amounted to a genre of poetry vastly more compelling than the pared-down works made in response. But the vibration between Issa’s language and her sculptures trembled delicately with the restrained desperation of elegy, expressing what time and catastrophe, and war and displacement, have taken away.