NEW ACQUISITION IMAN ISSA

»Sometimes you come across (an image of) a statue, a monument, a building, an event, barely looking at it and hardly noticing it. Even when you do notice it, it feels inconsequential; a benign sign of a time gone by, regardless of how violent that time was, or is perceived to have been. But there are other times when you cross an image of the same statue, monument, or building realizing that looking at it has become unbearable—That it is clearly malicious and destructive to your being. You take account of it now as an active agent in a recurrent violence which, you also now clearly understand, has never ceased. 
What a photograph features and what can be deciphered from it are arguably two different things, most likely related to a time and place. A photograph can be mute until it acquires a title, a date, a location, or a footnote, after which it may remain mute or contrarily start outright screaming. A few years later, one may encounter the same photograph, with the same added title, the same added date, the same added location, and the same added footnote, realizing that it has lost its scream or has acquired one it lacked before. But this is all (im)possible for one to ascertain or claim about a different time and place, for we are here and we are now.« (Iman Issa)

Hamburger Kunsthalle is pleased to present in the Atrium of tthe Gallery of Contemporary Art the new acquisition of two major pieces by Iman Issa from her series Doubles: Photograph—(Un)Like (M)Any Other(s), which posits a relationship between museum-like labels and lacquered metal sculptures, revolving in each work around a collection of two photographs from different time periods and geographies, but which share the same title. The work Lab Operator (2024) is a sculpture with a text describing two photographs captured by photojournalists, the one in Egypt in 1943, the one in Iran in 2024. In Woman with a Wheelbarrow (2024) the text is describing a chromogenic color print from 2024, shot in Egypt and a gelatin silver print in black and white, 1934 taken in the USA. Iman Issa uses a variety of forms and strategies to investigate the political and personal associations of history, language and the object. She creates ambiguous, poetic displays through the juxtaposition of text and object. 

About Iman Issa 

Iman Issa (b. 1979, Cairo) lives and works in Vienna and Paris. 
She is a recipient of the Ernst Rietschel Art Award for Sculpture 2024, the 2017 Vilcek Prize, the 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the 2013 Abraaj Group Art Prize and HNF-MACBA Award in 2012 and was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2017 among others. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Lenbachhaus, Munich; DAAD, Berlin; Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen; Whitney Biennial, New York; Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Spike Island, Bristol; Lisbon; MACBA, Barcelona; Perez Museum, Miami; the 12th Sharjah Biennial; the 8th Berlin Biennial; MuHKA, Antwerp; New Museum, New York; and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MACBA, Barcelona; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Magasin III, Stockholm among others.

More information on our collection