The 20th century has seen much criticism of the visual rhetoric of official memorials. Iman Issa’s series Material, 2010-11, updates these concepts. The artist, who is Egyptian by birth, creates clear forms without any clearly defined meaning – the antithesis to set-in-stone ideological monuments. She uses a minimalist vocabulary of forms to create her proposed and alternative public memorials. Each of these artworks (described by Issa as a “display”) consists of a collection of objects combined with a vinyl text on a nearby wall, and relates to an existing monument in Issa’s home city of Cairo. These very long, instructive titles are an integral part of each of Issa’s displays. The descriptions interact with the referenced monument, but without giving details or the location of the memorial.
Iman Issa
Material for a sculpture commemorating the life of a soldier who died defending his nation against intruding enemies, 2012
