Images of a center by Iman Issa
Egypt
5 min | 2005
The Film
Issa invents a character that describes a city, which is never named. The video, composed of the narrator’s text and public domain landscape images, emerges from the artist’s attempt to describe a personal relationship and a set of observations of a familiar location, searching for an appropriate language – both textual and visual – to accomplish this task. The utopian narrative and almost indistinguishable images gain resonance and specificity through the artist’s articulation of these elements in her work.
The Filmmaker
Iman Issa is an artist living and working in Cairo and New York. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Material’, took place at the Rodeo Gallery in Istanbul, in addition to selected shows including at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, the Sculpture Center in New York, the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo and the Art Dubai Special Projects. Her videos have been screened at the Tate Modern, London, Spacex, Exeter, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, and at the Bidoun Artists Cinema, Dubai. In her practice Issa deals with questions of language, place, methodically questioning the relationship between history, the city, personal cognition and experience. Lyrical and encrypted, her works pose systematic questions, a little off-centre, insinuating narrative and always resisting placement or definition.
