In her latest sculpture series, Heritage Studies, Iman Issa explores the contemporary resonance of historical artifacts. The three sculptures in this gallery take inspiration from objects the artist encountered in museums. To accompany her historical riffs, Issa provides museum-style didactics that reference their original sources, identifying material, time period, and provenance. Rather than describing the objects in the gallery, the artist's texts point to her historical inspiration. Operating at the junction where the contemporary objects and their historical contexts meet, Heritage Studies proposes a new iconography that is shaped by an alternative reading of official history.

Gallery label from

Unfinished Conversations, March 19-July 30, 2017.

Medium Brass rods, painted board or plywood, and vinyl text
Dimensions Overall 63 3/8 × 101 1/8 × 4 3/8" (161 × 256.9 × 11.1 cm)
Credit Fund for the Twenty-First Century
Object number 211.2016.a-l
Department Painting & Sculpture

Explore more

Iman Issa

Iman Issa

Egyptian and American, born 1979 3 works online

Iman Issa’s work is driven by her intense interest in history and her insistence on questioning the preconceptions that govern knowledge.

Learn more →
All works by Iman Issa →

From MoMA Design Store

Installation views

We have identified this work in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works
In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].
Licensing
To reproduce installation views, please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations). You will need to include the object identification number found in the caption.
Feedback
This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].

Licensing

Artwork or archival images

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA's collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

Audio and film clips

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit Circulating Film and Video Library.

Text from a publication or the archives

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA's archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please fill out this feedback form.