Iman Issa

May 13, 2019

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Iman Issa

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Iman Issa: My name is Iman Issa, and I'm an artist.

Heritage Studies was not in reference to my heritage, because actually the objects have very little to do with my heritage. But heritage studies as a term is a certain way of looking at the past, with the idea of the practical end to the present.

Basically most of the objects which I ended up using for this project were from museums. With this idea of remaking them based on their relevance ended up looking completely different from the originals. So therefore came the idea with this object, with this project, that you can have two objects, which share neither the material, neither the shape, neither the color, neither the dimensions. But you can still speak of them as the same, based on the idea that they're doing the same thing.

Narrator: Issa provides labels for each object.

Iman Issa: So for some of them you would have the location where the object came from. You always have the museum, but I always use a descriptive language to denote the museum, as opposed to a name.  I feel like the work is not really about the particular museum, it's not a critique of museums, it's just relying on this language to help these objects speak.


On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

Learn more about this project

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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