Iman Issa Invites You to Bear Witness

‘When you show something, you take for granted that it can be seen,’ said Iman Issa during a talk at carlier | gebauer about her current solo exhibition, which centres photography as a way of thinking about and approaching the world. Issa emphasizes that the recognition of an image is never guaranteed and that gaps exist between what is depicted and the act of bearing witness. The artist explores the very nature of visibility, asking how pictorial meaning is framed by time, language, place and audience.

Issa’s new series, ‘Doubles: Photograph – (Un)Like (M)Any Other(s)’ (all works 2024), is not comprised of photographs per se. Rather, it posits a relationship between museum-like labels and lacquered metal sculptures that speaks to what activates images. Take, for example, Scientist, in which a wall text delineates the title, dates and media of two photographs that are not present in the space, but presumably depict the titular figure. It’s not obvious how Issa came across the images, but it’s clear that they were taken at different times and places: a digital inkjet print shot in the Gaza Strip in 2024; and a 1993 chromatic print from an unspecified location, likely pertaining to the genocide during the Bosnian War (1992–95).

Reading these words and dates prompts mental images that are further shaped by the adjacent accompanying sculpture of a blue body – comprising forms reduced to their essential lines: ovals, triangles, two-pronged hands – weighted by a test-tube-like base containing cobalt fluid. Water, blood and the fragility of human life are all suggested here, as a dialogue develops between the generic and the specific in these faceless sculptures that, while recalling simple infographics, are rooted in humanitarian atrocities.

Such oscillation also underpins the two digital C-prints that open the show and echo one another as doubles. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Germany, 2024 and See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Egypt, 2013 are identical images of discarded pages from an Arabic calendar that we interpret differently according to the date and location in the respective titles, and which pointedly call out the cowardice of rewarding wrongdoing with silence. The former evokes Germany’s unwavering support of Israel despite the horrors of the ever-rising death toll of Palestinians; the latter, the 2013 Egyptian coup and its corollaries. The repetition of the image compresses the distance between the two geographies and dates, reminding us that it takes the viewer’s attentive engagement to comprehend the historical significance of each.

The exhibition itself is somewhat overhung, with the new works accompanied by a number of pieces from older series. These include Animal Masks for Tribunal Scene (2022), in which six variously hued, 3D-printed masks hang from the ceiling; they are connected by reams of thread and rest alongside a text panel describing a film of a courtroom that cuts to a morgue piled with bodies. The overall result is an overwhelming multitude of entangled narratives. But surely that’s what Issa wants us to feel: the push and pull between layers of history, gathering new meanings at each turn, sometimes seemingly distant, at others right up close.

Issa’s work hinges on a post-structuralist system of relations that emphasizes the primacy of an individual’s interpretation of signs (à la Roland Barthes), and what they are able to bring to the act of seeing. Susan Sontag’s assertion in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others also feels relevant here. She argued that photography nurtures a voyeurism that can diminish the meaning of events, enacting a tension with politics but avoiding active involvement. By not showing us the photographs or films that are described on her wall labels, Issa denies the possibility of idle voyeurism and makes interlocutors of us all.

Iman Issa's ‘Photograph—(Un)Like (M)Any Other(s)’ is on view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin, until 22 June

^{Main image: Iman Issa, ‘Doubles: Photograph – (Un)Like (M)Any Other(s)’ (detail), 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; photograph: © Iman Issa}