Iman Issa was born in 1979 in Cairo. She studied philosophy, political science, and visual arts at the American University in Cairo, and visual arts at Columbia University, New York, where she received her MFA in 2007. Issa works primarily in installation, employing a variety of forms and strategies to investigate the political and personal associations of history, language, and the object. Her work often also has a textual component. In projects marked by a detached sensibility, Issa reinterprets historical objects on an intimate scale. Her series Material (2010–12) features displays with biting titles that point to the impossibility of representing the past with absolute fidelity. For example, Material for a sculpture recalling the destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance (2010) features a piece of mahogany propped diagonally on a pedestal, a fez’s tassel dangling from its upper edge. The wood itself projects a degree of material strength, but the sculpture as a whole is far more ambiguous, conveying little more than an ironic hint of its supposed commemorative significance. Lexicon (2012— ) is a multipart installation in which Issa again considers the open interpretive space between text and object. Using succinct texts to describe mid-to-late twentieth-century artworks with weighty single-word titles like Seduction and Laboring, the artist pairs each object with a contemporary remaking. In doing so, she unhinges the physical work from its written “definition” and points to both the mutability of language and the sometimes-arbitrary nature of museological display. Likewise, in the Heritage Studies series (2015– ), Issa reimagines historical artifacts from museums and archaeological sites. The resultant sculptures, placed alongside labels detailing the original relics, wonder aloud about whether the objects’ accounts of political and social histories are not similarly capricious. Issa has had solo exhibitions at Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2008); Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld, Germany (2010); Mercer Union, Toronto (2012); Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2013); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2013); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015); Glasgow Sculpture Studios (2015); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2015); and 21er Haus, Vienna (2015). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Goethe-Institut, Cairo (2002); MACRO, Rome (2004); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2006); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2007); Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide (2010); Center for Contemporary Art—Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2010); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011); Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2013); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2014); Stroom Den Haag, The Hague (2014); Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2014), and Werkstätten und Kulturhaus, Vienna (2015). Her awards include the Han Nefkens—MACBA Award for Contemporary Art and the Abraaj Group Arts Prize (both 2012), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015). Issa teaches at the Cooper Union in New York, and lives and works in Cairo and New York.