Heritage Studies

Overview

Iman Issa's precise compositional language – marked by familiar geometric shapes, clean lines and adaptions of museological display – mine the latent meaning and transformational potential in aesthetic forms.
‘Heritage Studies’ (2015– ) is a new series of displays based on existing museum objects, artworks and elements from the past. Although the works do not always bear physical resemblance to their historical referents, they share similar sets of concerns. Exploring a generative rather than nostalgic approach to the past, Issa’s reimagination of historical form suggests an attempt to unfix ideas from their physical and historical strictures. The first five displays from ‘Heritage Studies’, presented in SB12, are among Issa’s largest works to date, occupying contemporary space and time at a scale approximate to the human body. Each work is accompanied by a caption that borrows from the objective tone of many museums, providing descriptive cues that offer an historical anchor while casting lines of communicative possibility toward the present.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 12