Carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is pleased to announce A Game, or So You May Think, a solo exhibition by Iman Issa.
A monument becomes an alternative to another monument. Or perhaps it merely borrows its posture. A photograph is given several possible lives. A caption approaches an object, pauses beside it, then moves elsewhere. Nothing is quite where it was expected to be. Iman Issa’s work often begins with forms we believe we recognise: the memorial, the museum label, the historical photograph, the self-portrait. These are forms accustomed to speaking with authority. They tell us what is being commemorated, who is represented, where an object comes from and why it matters. They appear to close the distance between a thing and what it is taken to signify.
Issa opens that distance again. Her sculptures, photographs and texts borrow the structures through which institutions stabilise meaning but reorganise them so that objects cease to function as evidence and begin to operate as propositions. A description may generate a new object rather than explain an existing one. Elsewhere, a sculpture responds to a monument absent from the room.