Iman Issa | A Game, or So You May Think

4 days ago

2 min read

Calle de José Marañón 4–7 | 28010 Madrid | SpainPhone +34 91 154 43 59 | madrid@carliergebauer.com | www.carliergebauer.com

PRESS RELEASE

11.09.–14.11.2026

carlier | gebauer, Madrid, is pleased to announce A Game, or So You May Think, a solo exhibition by Iman Issa.

Something Else Appears Among Them

An essay on Iman Issa’s exhibition A Game, or So You May Think

A monument becomes an alternative to another monument, or perhaps it simply borrows its posture. A photograph holds several possible lives. A caption approaches an object, pauses beside it, and then continues somewhere else. Nothing is exactly where we expected to find it.

Iman Issa’s work often begins with forms we believe we recognise: the memorial, the museum label, the historical photograph, the self-portrait. These are forms accustomed to speaking with authority. They tell us what is being commemorated, who is represented, where an object comes from, and why it matters. They seem to close the distance between a thing and its meaning.

Issa, however, reopens that distance. Her sculptures, photographs, and texts borrow the structures through which institutions stabilise meaning, but reorganise them in such a way that objects cease to function as evidence and begin to operate as propositions. A description may give rise to a new object rather than explain an existing one. Elsewhere, a sculpture responds to a monument absent from the room. A self-portrait unfolds through the biography of another person. A single photograph holds several captions, several places, several stories, even though only one of them is presented as correct.

Correct—for whom? The question remains close.

This is not a practice of concealment. Meaning is not buri

Iman Issa, A Game, or So You May Think, exhibition views at carlier | gebauer, Madrid, 2026.