Chicago
Egyptian-born Iman Issa investigates the power of display in relation to academic and cultural institutions. Her current exhibition, “A Game, or So You May Think” (on view through September 21, 2025), demonstrates her commitment to producing art that is not about illustrating the world but about fabricating forms that raise questions and challenge assumptions. As curator Giampaolo Bianconi explains, Issa’s work creates a “basic distrust between what can be seen and what is, encouraging viewers to consider the limitations of perception versus truth.”
The seven works from Issa’s ongoing “Heritage Studies” series installed outdoors on the Institute’s Bluhm Family Terrace reveal her interest in history as well as the specificity of place. These elegant forms, some of which recall outdoor chess pieces, are arranged in dialogue. Some stand erect, evincing an architectonic semblance that responds to the skyline of Chicago, “birthplace of the skyscraper,” while others hug the ground. Is the display meant to be a game for viewers to solve? Is there something more serious at stake in the forms and their relations? What has influenced their creation, and how are we intended to mentally piece them together?
At first glance, Issa’s fabrications resemble Minimalist sculptures. In fact, her work has always projected an underlying kinship with the basic tenets of Minimalism—that the idea behind the art should create its meaning, the object should not be a copy of anything else, and viewers should react only to what is before their eyes. However, closer scrutiny reveals that each of her “Heritage Studies” reaches beyond those parameters to translate a historical artifact so altered that the likeness between original and Issa’s new form can be difficult to discern. We have to question the connection and what we know by looking.
Interestingly, Issa does not consider herself to be a sculptor. In a 2017 interview in Bomb Magazine with Andrew Weiner, she said, “I don’t think of myself as an object-maker or a sculptor. I like both object and sculpture as terms and see how they might be useful in thinking about the work. But I use the word ‘display’ to describe the work, in the sense that the work is composed of a set of elements relying on and relating to each other.”
This approach brings her work closer to that of Roni Horn, who uses Minimalist forms and materials but imbues them with personal and environmental elements, moving beyond purely formal concerns. Additionally, Issa’s notion of display hinges on a post-Structuralist system of relations that accentuates the primacy of an individual’s understanding of signs and what they are able to bring to the act of seeing.
The backdrop of Chicago’s iconic buildings—from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to Mies van der Rohe and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill—framed by the glass walls of the terrace enhances Issa’s meticulously crafted forms and hints at least some of their possible references. In Heritage Studies #40 (2022), one half of a white, tiered tower stands tall, its cleaved twin implied by a shadow-like copper panel resting on the ground. Heritage Studies #42 and Heritage Studies #43 (both 2023), apparently constructed from specialized rolls of flooring material, call to mind Carl Andre’s floor sculptures. But #42 glistens with warm bronze and brass hues, and the juxtaposition of 12 distinct alternating tiles with the polished, unraveled surface prompts questions. In #43, irregular geometric copper plates stunningly abut a smooth turquoise surface.
Each form is like a puzzle piece, offering ambiguity and mystery but not revealing the larger whole, even when considered together. Viewers must rely on imagination and intellect to reach conclusions. Issa’s work is filled with metaphorical content and the physical example of organized actions portrayed through the language of abstraction.
