Proxies, with a Life of their Own

Iman Issa has spent large parts of her life living in Cairo, New York, and Berlin. She started out a painter, then moved into photography, made videos and sound installations, wrote compelling and elusive texts, and is most often considered a sculptor these days. But her answers to the question of medium remain highly variable, and deliberately so. What links her works together, from her early photographs and sculptures made of wood, glitter, bits of mirror, and colored light bulbs through the masterful chains of association that fire long-term series such as “Triptychs,” “Material,” and “Common Elements,” is both a method, of consistently stripping away identifying details—footholds that would give viewers an illusion, reliably false, of knowing what the artist is up to—and a sustained inquiry into how meaning is produced, communicated, and received. That suggests, in effect, that her work is a constant, rigorous, and probably inexhaustible search for the forms that may tell us something about how meaning is made, and why.